WaPo (“FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign before Trump takes office“):
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray announced Wednesday that he would resign at the end of the Biden administration, stepping down as the leader of the powerful law enforcement bureau before President-elect Donald Trump takes office and can fire him.
Wray’s resignation comes seven years into his 10-year term — a tenure that is meant to span multiple administrations and is intentionally longer than other executive branch appointments to avoid politicization of the FBI. Trump announced last month that he would nominate loyalist Kash Patel to serve as FBI director, sending a message to Wray that he should either resign or prepare to be fired.
Patel has echoed Trump’s calls for retribution against perceived enemies, and has called for using federal law enforcement to prosecute both political opponents and journalists. His looming nomination, along with Wray’s decision to resign, underscores the reality that the Trump administration will attempt to obliterate long-standing norms at the FBI and dramatically reshape the bureau.
Wray announced his plans at a town hall with the FBI workforce Wednesday afternoon, telling his employees that while it was a hard decision to cut his term short, he believed it was the best one for the bureau. It was an emotional meeting, according to an FBI official, and Wray’s announcement was met with a long-standing ovation from his staff. After the town hall, Wray shook hands with many of the FBI employees in the room.
“My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day. In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work,” Wray said, according to excerpts released by the FBI.
“It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway — this is not easy for me,” he continued. “I love this place, I love our mission, and I love our people — but my focus is, and always has been, on us and doing what’s right for the FBI.”
Trump exulted in Wray’s announcement Wednesday, writing on social media that it was “a great day for America.”
The Atlantic‘s Jonathan Chait deems this “A Scandalous Resignation.”
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.
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.
Since before Trump’s re-election, Yale historian Timothy Snyder has been urging,
Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
In a very real sense, Wray is violating this precept. There’s a good argument that, since Directors are appointed by law for a ten-year term, he should have held firm, demanding that Trump fire him to exact some modest cost for breaking the norm. Why he did not do that, I do not know.
Here’s what he said about the matter:
I want to address a topic that’s been the subject of a lot of speculation, and that’s my future as FBI Director. Since the moment I started in this job seven-plus years ago, my focus has been on trying to do what I think is best for our institution—for the Bureau, and ultimately, for the American people we serve, and what sets us up best for success—not just today, but in the long run. So after weeks of careful thought, I’ve decided the right thing for the Bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current Administration in January and then step down.
My goal is to keep the focus on our mission—the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day. And in my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.
It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: This is not easy for me. I love this place. I love our mission. And I love our people. But my focus is, and always has been, on us and doing what’s right for the FBI. And it was important to me that you all got to hear about my decision directly from me, before it gets announced publicly.
That’s all he said about the matter.
It’s possible he thinks making it easy will spare the Bureau more public harassment from Trump. Almost certainly, it spares Wray and his family from it.
Regardless, while it’s a ten-year term, the FBI Director serves at the pleasure of the President. Bill Clinton fired William Sessions, albeit following a DOJ ethics probe that revealed substantial issues. Trump fired Comey, ostensibly for lying to Congress about the Hillary Clinton email investigation but, in actuality, for investigating the Trump 2016 campaign’s ties to the Russian government. He was ready to fire Wray—whom he himself appointed—over various slights, most notably ordering a raid at Mar a Lago to seize classified documents Trump stole and refused to return.
It now falls to the Senate to decide whether to allow Trump to turn the FBI into a personal vengeance team under Patel or some other lackey. I have little faith in their steadfastness.
