A Scandalous Resignation
FBI Director Christopher Wray, like so many Republicans who
couldn’t stomach Trump’s demands, decided to go gentle into that good night.
December 11, 2024,
6:37 PM ET
When Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, in 2017,
I was about to drive my daughter and some of her friends to a soccer tryout. I
remember that the news came moments before we left; once we arrived, I sat on a
bench next to the soccer field, scrolling through incredulous and fearful
reactions on Twitter. The news was widely considered akin to Richard Nixon’s
Saturday Night Massacre, one of the most odious scandals in American
history. TRUMP
FIRES COMEY AMID RUSSIA INQUIRY, screamed a banner
headline on the front page of The New York Times.
Now Trump, preparing for his second term as president, has
decided to replace the FBI director again. The figure he picked to replace
Comey—the lifelong Republican Christopher Wray—proved unable to meet Trump’s
expectations for the position, which are (1) to permit Trump and his allies to
violate the law with impunity, and (2) to investigate anybody who interferes
with (1). Wray, wrestling with the problem of Trump’s desire to separate him
from a job he apparently liked, chose to step down on his own. This raises the
likelihood that the media will treat the replacement of Wray as normal
administrative turnover rather than as a scandal.
But a scandal it most certainly is. By tradition, FBI
directors serve 10-year terms, a norm designed to insulate the FBI from
pressure to serve the president’s whims. Trump supporters have two
philosophical rationalizations for his demand to violate that tradition. The
lowbrow, populist version favored by Trump cultists is that Trump is beset by a
“deep state” conspiracy that has kneecapped him at every turn because it is
loyal to globalists, neoconservatives, or some other corrupt network. The
highbrow version, preferred by conservative-movement elites, is that
presidents possess an inherent right to control the executive branch from top
to bottom, and all norms designed to prevent the president from abusing that
power are an affront to the Constitution.
Neither theory can explain why Trump continues to go to war
with people he appointed himself. Wray is not a Democrat, nor is he
a Never Trumper. He’s a Republican picked by Trump. So was former Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, a Trump loyalist, and his successor, William Barr, who
auditioned to succeed Sessions by performing even more obsequious loyalty to
Trump.
The problem that keeps arising is that there is no way to
remain in Trump’s favor while following the law. In a celebratory statement posted to Truth Social, Trump
claims, “Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my
home, without cause.” Had the FBI raid actually been illegal, he could have
proved that in court. He didn’t, because by taking massive troves of classified
documents when he left office, keeping them in a wildly unsecured location,
refusing multiple requests to return them, lying repeatedly about it, and
engaging in a clumsy cover-up, Trump had given the bureau no other choice. For
Wray to allow this brazen defiance of the law would have been to simply admit
that the law doesn’t apply to Trump, in or out of office.
David Frum: A constitutional crisis greater than Watergate
But that is precisely the credo Trump demands that the
bureau follow. It is why he has selected Kash Patel, a sycophant so childishly worshipful
that he spelled out his loyalty to Trump in a literal children’s book portraying Trump as a
virtuous king and himself as Trump’s loyal wizard. Perhaps Patel (or whomever
Senate Republicans ultimately confirm for the position) will, once in office,
somehow develop an adult, professionalized understanding of the rule of law.
More likely, Trump’s FBI director will discover that actually locking up
Trump’s enemies is hard. This was the anticlimactic outcome of the Durham investigation, Trump’s first-term
campaign to imprison his foes, which resulted, after months of
conservative-media salivating, in two embarrassing acquittals in court.
Still, the risk of turning the bureau over to a director
who intends to abuse its powers is quite serious. Republicans tended to
downplay these risks during the campaign, pointing to Trump’s first term, when
Democrats and the media loudly decried Trump’s norm-violating authoritarian
gambits, only for the system to hold. The fact that Trump is hunting down the
very people who made the system hold is a logical flaw these Republicans have
steadfastly refused to consider.
Discouragingly, Republican willpower to resist Trump’s most
corrupt impulses appears to be a finite resource. When Wray announced that he
was stepping down, three years short of completing his standard 10-year term,
he poignantly confessed his regret: “It should go without saying, but I’ll say
it anyway—this is not easy for me.”
It is, however, easy for Donald Trump. The president-elect
had been facing the unpleasant task of firing a lifelong Republican whom he had
selected himself, inviting the national media to raise ugly questions about his
oft-confessed desire to turn the federal criminal-justice apparatus into a
weapon of political vengeance. Instead, Wray, like so many Republicans who
couldn’t stomach Trump’s demands, decided to go gentle into that good night.
Nobody except Wray will remember where they were when Christopher Wray
resigned.