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President-elect Donald Trump is still assembling his Cabinet for a second term, and many other government positions will be open when he is sworn into office in January.
But expectations are rising that firing FBI Director Christopher Wray will soon create at least one new vacancy.
This personnel change may be cyclical, as it was Trump who nominated and hired Republican Wray to a 10-year term in 2017. Still, Trump has never shied away from firing people he once supported.
FBI Directors earned these 10-year terms as a result of post-Watergate legislation and in response to J. Edgar Hoover’s far too long and dominant leadership of the FBI over 48 years.
The length of the term is intended to put political pressure on the director. But it never works out that way.
President Trump famously fired then-FBI Director James Comey a few months after taking office in 2017. Mr. Comey, also a Republican, was appointed to the post by Democratic President Barack Obama. (Comey later said in 2018 that he “couldn’t engage” with the Republican Party, citing Trump’s influence in the party.)
In 1993, Bill Clinton fired then-FBI Director William Sessions after an internal ethics report came to light during the previous year’s presidential campaign. Questions included questions about the $10,000 fence erected around the director’s home and his airline tickets.
Jimmy Carter had previously fired then-FBI Director Clarence Kelly during the 1976 presidential campaign over revelations about improperly installed window curtains in his home. He suggested that it would be possible. Douglas Charles, a history professor at Pennsylvania State University, said Carter didn’t immediately fire Kelly when he took over the White House, but Kelly was eventually forced to resign. He pointed out that the scandal was “very small fry today.”
But at the time, Mr. Carter’s decision to fire Mr. Kelly would have been a test of a new law passed by Congress in 1976.
“There was certainly a question of how any president could fire the FBI director when the legal term is 10 years,” Charles said.
That question is clearly answered now, but previous firings were about ethics and personal failings. Mr. Trump’s argument concerns policy differences regarding the overall role of the Justice Department.
The reasons for Comey’s firing contained in a memo prepared for the Trump administration’s Justice Department were contradictory. Comey was criticized both for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton over her handling of classified materials and for releasing “derogatory” information about Clinton at a press conference.
As President Trump admitted to NBC News at the time, the real reason Comey was fired was his investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in 2016.
Amid the uproar that followed Comey’s firing, it was then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, author of the Justice Department memo recommending Comey’s firing, who appointed a special counsel to follow up on the Russia investigation.
Rosenstein appointed the special counsel after Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from investigations related to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Mr. Sessions did so because he did not disclose during his Senate confirmation hearing his pre-election contacts with Russia’s then-ambassador to the United States.
Who did Mr. Rosenstein choose to be the special counsel to lead the Russia investigation? Robert S. Mueller III, who happens to be a former FBI director. Mr. Mueller is widely respected and served as head of the FBI days before the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Congress passed a special law during the Obama administration that extended the term by two years.
Anyone who remembers President Trump’s first term knows that speculation about the Russia investigation sucked up much of the oxygen in Washington and that Trump’s 2016 campaign, including campaign chairman Paul Manafort, whom President Trump later pardoned, You will recall that this led to the indictment of several key aides. President Trump complained that the investigation was part of a “deep state” effort to undermine him.
Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen’s cooperation with Mueller’s investigation led to revelations about hush-money payments for which Trump was convicted in New York earlier this year. President Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records was postponed indefinitely after his election victory.
The release of Mueller’s report was slowed by the Trump administration’s second attorney general, Bill Barr, giving the impression that Mueller’s report exonerated Trump. It wasn’t.
Mr. Mueller was bound by Justice Department rules barring prosecution of a sitting president. When the full report was released in April 2019, Mueller said there was not enough evidence to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Nor did it particularly prove Trump’s innocence.
“Although this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” the report said. It also concluded that while the 2016 Trump campaign expected help from Russia, there was no collusion with Russia. After years of President Trump referring to the Mueller investigation as a “Russian hoax,” it has been forgotten.
There are certain aspects of Mueller’s investigation, particularly those that helped generate the discredited Steele dossier, that will forever anger Trump.
There have also been related scandals, including the release of anti-Trump documents by FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was involved in the Mueller investigation at the time, and Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer at the time who was dating Strzok. there were. Incident. In July, the FBI agreed to pay Mr. Strzok and Mr. Page $2 million in compensation for the release of these text messages.
Another FBI official, Andrew McCabe, who briefly served as acting director after Trump fired Comey, was also fired by Sessions just days before leaving office. McCabe, now a CNN contributor, eventually got his pension back in court.
Mr. Wray was overwhelmingly confirmed to replace Mr. Comey in August 2017, in part because he promised during his confirmation hearing that he would maintain his independence from the White House. Trump, on the other hand, values loyalty.
Even when Trump was still president in 2020, he was already criticizing Wray. One reason was that he felt Mr. Wray was not cooperating with special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Mr. Barr to replace Mr. Sessions to investigate Mr. Mueller’s investigation.
Put all this together and you can see why President Trump is seeking allies in the Justice Department, including the FBI.
Douglas said that about 100 years ago, in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal that exposed corruption within the federal government, there was talk in the Senate of completely removing the Justice Department, including the FBI, from politics and abolishing it altogether. Ta. Employees are an independent part of the civil service.
Today, President Trump wants to go in the opposite direction and bring the FBI even more under presidential control.
