() – President-elect Donald Trump is still assembling the Cabinet for his second term, and many other government jobs will open when he is sworn into office in January.
But there is growing expectation that he will quickly create at least one new vacancy by firing FBI Director Christopher Wray.
There would be some circularity to that particular personnel move, since it was Trump who hired Wray, a Republican, by nominating him for a 10-year term in 2017. That said, Trump has never been shy about firing someone he once back.
FBI directors get those 10-year terms as a result of a post-Watergate law that arose in response to J. Edgar Hoover’s overly long and controlling 48 years at the helm of the FBI.
The length of the mandate is supposed to protect the director from political pressures. But it never works like that.
Trump famously fired then-FBI Director James Comey months after taking office in 2017. Comey was also a Republican, although he was nominated for the position by Democratic President Barack Obama. (Comey later said that “cannot be associated” with the Republican Party due to Trump’s influence in the organization).
In 1993, Bill Clinton fired then-FBI Director William Sessions after an internal ethics report surfaced during the previous year’s presidential campaign. It included questions about a $10,000 fence installed around the director’s home and the flights he had taken, among other issues.
Previously, Jimmy Carter suggested during the 1976 presidential campaign that he would have fired then-FBI Director Clarence Kelley over revelations about curtains improperly installed in his home, among other things. Carter did not immediately fire Kelley when he arrived at the White House, but Kelley was eventually forced to resign, according to Douglas Charles, a history professor at Pennsylvania State University, who noted that the curtain scandal “seems like a small thing today.” ride.”
But at that time, Carter would have tested the new law, passed by Congress in 1976, to fire Kelley.
“The question was certainly raised whether a president could fire an FBI director with a 10-year term,” Charles said.
Although that question has now been clearly answered, those previous dismissals concerned ethics and personal failures. Trump’s have to do with political differences, including over the role of the Justice Department in general.
The stated reasons for Comey’s firing, laid out in a memorandum prepared for Trump’s Justice Department, were contradictory. Comey was criticized both for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified material and for publishing “derogatory” information about Clinton in a press conference.
The real reason Comey was fired, Trump admitted to NBC News at the time, was Comey’s investigation into ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
In the furor that followed Comey’s firing, it was the author of the Justice Department memo recommending Comey’s firing, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to follow up on the Russia investigation.
Rosenstein appointed the special counsel because Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had recused himself from any investigation related to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Sessions did so because he had failed to disclose pre-election contacts during Senate confirmation hearings. which he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time.
Who did Rosenstein choose as special counsel to lead that Russia investigation? To Robert S. Mueller III, who turned out to be a former FBI director. Mueller was widely respected and had taken charge of the FBI days before the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Congress approved a special law to extend his term for two years during the Obama administration.
Anyone who can remember Trump’s first term may remember that speculation about the Russia investigation sucked up much of the oxygen in Washington and led to the prosecution of several of Trump’s top campaign aides in 2016, including campaign chairman Paul Manafort, whom Trump later pardoned. Trump has complained that the investigation was part of a “deep state” effort to undermine him.
Former Trump confidant Michael Cohen’s cooperation with the Mueller investigation is what led to the revelations about the hush money payments for which Trump was convicted in New York earlier this year. Trump’s sentencing for his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records has been delayed indefinitely following his election victory.
The release of Mueller’s report was delayed by Trump’s second attorney general, Bill Barr, who gave the impression that Mueller’s report exonerated Trump. It wasn’t like that.
Mueller was limited by Justice Department rules that prohibit the prosecution of a sitting president. When the full report was released in April 2019, Mueller said there was insufficient evidence to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. He also did not specifically exonerate Trump.
“While 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 Trump’s 2016 campaign expected help from Russia, it did not conspire with Russia. That is forgotten after years of Trump referring to the Mueller investigation as the “Russia hoax.”
There are things that helped spawn the Mueller investigation, particularly the discredited “Steele dossier,” that will forever infuriate Trump.
There were also related scandals, such as the release of anti-Trump text messages by an FBI agent at the time, Peter Strzok, who initially played a role in the Mueller investigation, and Lisa Page, who was then an attorney. of the FBI with whom Strzok had an affair. The FBI agreed in July of this year to pay $2 million to Strzok and Page to compensate for the disclosure of those text messages.
Another FBI official, Andrew McCabe, who briefly served as acting director after Trump fired Comey, was fired by Sessions days before his retirement. McCabe, now a contributor, eventually recovered his pension in court.
Wray was overwhelmingly confirmed to succeed Comey in August 2017 in part by promising during confirmation hearings to maintain the independence of the White House. Trump, for his part, rewards loyalty.
Even when Trump was still president in 2020, he had already turned against Wray, in part because he felt Wray was not cooperating with special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Barr, Sessions’ replacement, to pursue the investigation of Mueller.
All of that explains why Trump wants loyal people 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 removing the Justice Department, including the FBI, completely from politics and converting it and everyone its employees in an independent part of the public administration.
Today Trump wants to go in the opposite direction and put the FBI under more control of the president.
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