Opinion: Christopher Wray just broke a fundamental rule in dealing with Donald Trump


For someone who played a tough-talking executive on television: “You're dismissed!” — Donald Trump surely does everything possible to avoid such confrontations. The real-life Donald, as president, usually had a hireling do the deed, sent him a letter to the media or simply tweeted the news.

But under FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, the president-elect took his passive-aggressive routine to a new level of humiliation.

Just after Thanksgiving, Trump aware 159 effusive words to announce that super loyal swindler 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 left in a 10-year term. For 11 excruciating days, Wray squirmed, until on Wednesday he accepted Trump's tacit invitation to go: Wray told FBI staff that he would resign before Trump's inauguration “to avoid dragging the office further into the fight.”

opinion columnist

Jackie Calmes

Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.

I shouldn't have done that. For the good of the office and the nation, Wray should have stayed after January 20, forcing Trump to fire him and take full responsibility for blatantly politicizing an institution that, given its police powers, should be above the partisanship. By quitting smoking, Wray is complicit in normalizing what is not normal at all.

As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder said. advised citizens At the beginning of his book “On Tyranny,” when dealing with would-be authoritarians, “Do not obey beforehand.” That, Snyder argued, only teaches whoever seizes power what they can do with theirs.

The shameless Trump immediately sent out a fundraising email upon news of Wray's surrender. “A great day for the United States,” he said. gloat in the application and on social media.”

Hardly. Trump is not yet president, and for the second time he begins by firing an FBI director expressly because Wray, like James B. Comey before him in 2017, would not profess loyalty and abandon the 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 directors of the FBI, both Republicans, of being the ones who politically weaponized the bureau, against him.

Just because Trump's breaking of norms is no longer surprising doesn't mean it shouldn't be surprising. Yes, he has the right to fill his cabinet with people of his choice, with the approval of the Senate, a constitutional obstacle that he is overcoming. tried to bend over – or fire them. But federal law and Justice Department policies since the Watergate era have set up some unique barriers between presidents and the FBI, given the demonstrated potential for abuse of its vast law enforcement powers.

The director's mandate (only one, 10 years) was to be a main limitation. Congress set the limit in 1976 in response to a confluence of FBI abuses: first by Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose 48-year dictatorial reign and rampant 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 the use of the FBI to attack those in his enemies list.

The goal of the law was expressly to prevent lifetime directors like Hoover, but also to keep the term long enough to overlap the four- or eight-year terms of the presidents and thus help insulate the director from the political pressures of the White House.

Like the Senate report As the law states, an FBI director “is not an ordinary Cabinet appointment who is generally considered a politically oriented member of the President's 'team.'” Combining the value of the FBI's criminal investigative powers with the danger what they assume if they are perverted, The report adds: “makes the position of FBI director unique.”

However, we now have a former and future president who insist that all his appointees are “team” players. To that end, Trump has twice ignored the 10-year legal mandate, unlike President Biden, who kept Republican Wray in office without question. Trump seeks to install someone, Patel, who published a “deep state” enemies list he seeks guidance from Trump (it turns out he's something of a resume sweetener in Trump world) and has vowed to “destroy” the office and the Department of Justice. And who, on the other hand, sell Trump-branded merchandise under the “K$H” logo, including children’s books depicting “King Donald” and Patel himself as the monarch’s avenging wizard.

All FBI directors since Hoover have been Republicans, and Democratic Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden elected or retained them to symbolize that the position is above politics. Before Trump's two ousters, the only firing of an FBI chief was Clinton's. shot of William Sessions after taking office in 1993. But Clinton acted on findings of Sessions' ethics violations after an investigation launched under President George HW Bush.

The 1974 Senate report justifying a 10-year term recognized that a president's power to remove a director within that period “is formally unlimited.” But he suggested that the Senate, given its power to confirm a successor, would act as a check on that impeachment power – “and tolerate its exercise only for good reason” and “not simply because a new President wants his 'own man.'” in the position.”

Unfortunately, the authors did not anticipate today's Senate Republicans, whose subservience to the irate Trump exceeds their respect for the Senate's prerogatives and independence. No one has publicly opposed Patel's confirmation. Never mind that when Trump, in his first term, tried to appoint Patel as deputy director of the FBI, then a prosecutor. General William Barr said “over my dead body,” according to his memoirs.

Now Barr is on the Patel-Trump enemies list. It fell to Wray to confront Trump and Patel's rise, and to underline with his inevitable firing how transgressive Trump's action is. That Wray has backed down is another bad omen for the next four years.

@jackiekcalmes