Column: Christopher Wray just broke a prime rule of dealing with Donald Trump
For someone who played a tough-talking executive on TV — “You’re fired!” — Donald Trump sure goes out of his way to avoid such confrontations. The real-life Donald, as president, typically had a hireling do the deed, sent a letter to the media or simply tweeted the news.
But with FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, the president-elect took his passive-aggressive routine to a new level of humiliation.
Just after Thanksgiving, Trump posted 159 gushing words to announce that uber-loyalist grifter and fellow revenge seeker Kash Patel was his choice to be FBI director, and zero words acknowledging that Wray, Trump’s first-term pick for the job, had more than two years remaining on a 10-year term. For 11 excruciating days Wray twisted, until on Wednesday he accepted Trump’s unspoken invitation to go: Wray told FBI staff that he’d resign by Trump’s inauguration “to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray.”
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Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
He shouldn’t have done that. For the good of the bureau and the nation, Wray should have stayed past Jan. 20, forcing Trump to fire him and bear full responsibility for brazenly politicizing an institution that, given its police powers, must be above partisanship. By quitting, Wray is complicit in normalizing what is anything but normal.
As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder advised citizens in the opening of his book “On Tyranny,” when dealing with would-be authoritarians, “Do not obey in advance.” That, Snyder argued, only teaches the power grabber what they can get away with.
The shameless Trump immediately sent out a fundraising email on the news of Wray’s surrender. “A great day for America,” he gloated in the solicitation and on social media.
Hardly. Trump isn’t president yet and for the second time he’s starting by sacking an FBI director expressly because Wray, like James B. Comey before him in 2017, would not profess loyalty and drop well-deserved criminal investigations of Trump and his allies. And in an especially egregious example of the projection for which Trump is so well known, in each case he accused the FBI directors, both Republicans, of being the ones who politically weaponized the bureau — against him.
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Just because Trump’s norm shattering no longer surprises doesn’t mean it shouldn’t shock. Yes, he’s entitled to fill his Cabinet with people of his choice — with the Senate’s approval, a constitutional hurdle he’s tried to duck — or to fire them. But federal law and Justice Department policies since the Watergate era put some unique guardrails between presidents and the FBI, given the proven potential for abuse of its vast law enforcement powers.
The director’s term — just one, of 10 years — was meant to be a primary constraint. Congress set the limit in 1976 in response to a confluence of FBI abuses: first by Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose dictatorial 48-year reign and wanton violations of Americans’ civil liberties ended only with his death in 1972, and then by President Nixon, who resigned in 1974 amid the Watergate scandals, including his use of the FBI to target those on his enemies list.
The point of the law was expressly to avoid directors-for-life such as Hoover, but also to keep the term long enough to overlap presidents’ four- or eight-year tenures and thus help insulate the director from White House political pressures.
Trump’s explicit threats against the Bidens, and his first-term record of trying to politicize the Justice Department and FBI, almost justify an unpardonable pardon.
As the Senate report on the law stated, an FBI director “is not an ordinary Cabinet appointment which is usually considered a politically oriented member of the President’s ‘team.’” The combination of the value of the FBI’s criminal investigative powers together with their danger if perverted, the report added, “makes the office of FBI Director unique.”
Yet now we have a once and future president who insists that all his appointees be “team” players. To that end, Trump has now twice ignored the statutory 10-year term, unlike President Biden, who kept the Republican Wray in office without question. Trump seeks to install someone, Patel, who published a “Deep State” enemies list for Trump’s guidance — something of a resume sweetener in Trump world, it turns out — and has vowed “to destroy” the bureau and the Justice Department. And who, on the side, sells Trump-branded merch under the logo “K$H,” including children’s books depicting “King Donald” and Patel himself as the monarch’s avenging wizard.
Every FBI director since Hoover has been a Republican, and Democratic Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden either chose them or kept them on to symbolize that the job is above politics. Before Trump’s two defenestrations, the only dumping of an FBI chief was Clinton’s firing of William Sessions after taking office in 1993. But Clinton acted on findings of Sessions’ ethical infractions after a probe begun under President George H.W. Bush.
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The 1974 Senate report justifying a mandated 10-year term acknowledged that a president’s power to remove a director within that time “is formally unlimited.” But it suggested that the Senate, given its power to confirm a successor, would act as a check on that removal power — “and will tolerate its exercise for good reason only” and “not merely for the reason that a new President desires his ‘own man’ in the position.”
Alas, the authors didn’t anticipate today’s Senate Republicans, whose servility to the wrathful Trump exceeds their respect for the Senate’s prerogatives and independence. Not one has publicly opposed Patel’s confirmation. Never mind that when Trump, in his first term, tried to make Patel the FBI deputy director, then-Atty. Gen. William Barr said “over my dead body,” according to his memoir.
Now Barr is on the Patel-Trump enemies list. It was Wray’s turn to stand up to Trump and against Patel’s ascension, and to underscore by his inevitable firing how transgressive Trump’s action is. That Wray instead backed down is yet another bad omen for the next four years.
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