Trump’s FBI Flex
The firing of Christopher Wray is the real outrage. The
nomination of Kash Patel just adds frosting and sprinkles.
By David
Frum
For more than four decades before
Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a job above politics.
A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI
director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served
under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the
job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA.
Reagan’s FBI appointee served through the George H. W. Bush presidency and into
the Bill Clinton administration. Clinton fired the inherited official—the first time a
president ever fired an FBI director—only because the outgoing Bush
administration had left behind a Department of Justice report accusing the
director of ethical lapses. (Clinton tried to coax the tainted director into
resigning of his own volition. Only after the coaxing failed did Clinton act.)
And so it continued into
the 21st century. Except in a single case of serious scandal, Senate-confirmed
FBI directors stayed in post until they quit or until their 10-year term
expired. Never, never, never was a Senate-confirmed FBI director fired so that
the president could replace him with a loyalist.
Even Donald Trump grudgingly submitted
to the rule during his first term, as the Mueller Report later detailed. Trump
wanted to fire FBI Director James Comey to shut down the investigation of
Trump’s ties to Russia. Trump’s advisers convinced Trump that admitting the
truth would spark an enormous scandal. Instead, the new administration
inveigled the deputy attorney general to write a letter offering a more
neutral-seeming explanation: that Comey had mishandled the bureau’s investigation
of Hillary Clinton. That deceptive rationalization—the Mueller Report
authoritatively disproved the cover story—did not calm the
uproar over Trump’s scheme to install a henchman as FBI director. At the time,
even Trump supporters still professed that the FBI director must be more than a
presidential yes-man. Things were only quieted when Trump chose a politically
independent candidate to replace Comey: Christopher Wray, who holds the job to this day, retained through
all four years of the Biden administration.
Yesterday, Trump announced on Truth
Social that he intended to fire Wray to replace him with Kash Patel, a person
notorious for his cringing deference to Trump’s wishes. How bad a choice is
Patel? My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported that when President Trump
“entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill
Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, ‘Over my dead body.’”
But before getting to Patel’s
demerits, we should stay for a minute longer on the ominous danger of Trump’s
wish to fire Director Wray.
Read: The Kash Patel principle
FBI directors wield awesome powers
over the liberties of Americans. The unwritten rule governing their
appointment—no dismissal except for compelling cause—bulwarked American law and
freedom for half a century. Even first-term Trump dared not openly defy it. But
second-term Trump is opening with a bid to junk it altogether. Much of the
reporting on Trump’s announcement reveals a society already bending to Trump’s
will: Something that was regarded as outrageously unacceptable in 2017—treating
an FBI director as just another Trump aide—has been semi-normalized even before
President-elect Trump takes office.
The firing of Wray is the real
outrage. The obnoxious nomination of Patel slathers frosting and sprinkles on
the outrage.
Maybe the Patel nomination will fail,
as Trump’s attempt to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general failed. If Patel
fails, maybe Trump will fall back on a somewhat more respectable candidate.
That second candidate may be greeted with relief. But the essential harm will
be done by the firing of Wray, not the hiring of Patel (or whoever ultimately
gets the job). Already, not a month since the closest election by popular-vote
margin in two generations, we are witnessing throughout law enforcement
and the national-security agencies, a pattern of Trump’s trashing institutions
and replacing them with whim. Trump is declaring his intention to reinvent the
FBI as something it has never been before: an instrument of personal
presidential power, which will investigate (or refrain from investigating) and
lay charges (or refrain from laying charges) as the president wishes.
For secretary of defense, Trump has chosen an ideological crank whose own
mother accused him in writing of repeatedly
abusing women. (She subsequently disavowed the statements.) At the CIA,
Trump wants a hyper-partisan who as Trump’s
first-term director of national intelligence selectively declassified
information to discredit Trump’s political opponents. For his second-term
director of National Intelligence, Trump wants a longtime apologist for the Assad
regime in Syria and Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
Merit, competence, integrity—none of
that matters. Or rather, those good qualities seem to be active disqualifiers.
His picks are selected for obedience only.
Read: The man who will do anything for Trump
Now comes the great test: Is the
American constitutional system as fragile as Trump hopes? Will Wray meekly
accept termination or will he defend the bureau from Trump’s second and bolder
attempt to pervert it? Will Senate Republicans ratify Trump’s attack on the
separation of law enforcement from politics? Will federal courts grant warrants
to an FBI that seeks warrants and makes arrests because the president told it
to? Will the tiny Republican majority in the House endorse or resist Trump’s
attempt to create a personal police force? Does enough of an independent press
survive outside the control of Trump-friendly oligarchs to explain what is
happening and why it matters? Will enough of the public care, will enough of
the public react?
The American people voted for cheaper
eggs. They’re going to get only noise, conflict, and chaos. What Trump is
trying will, if successful, be a constitutional scandal far greater than
Watergate. If he succeeds, the seizure of power he unsuccessfully attempted in
2021 could be under way in 2025.