One of the most famous episodes in the Watergate saga 50 years ago was when CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr got a hold of Richard Nixon's "enemies list" and read it cold on the air, only to find himself listed at number 17.
The Nixon White House actually committed dozens of abuses that came to light during the investigations spawned by the Watergate break-in and one of them was the use of the FBI to investigate Nixon's enemies list. After discovering the full extent of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's overwhelming misuse of the bureau for decades, including blackmail, harassment and persecution, Congress erected some strong guardrails designed to prevent such things from happening again. The Senate Judiciary Committee report explained:
The purpose of the bill is to achieve two complimentary objectives. The first is to insulate the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from undue pressure being exerted upon him from superiors in the Executive Branch. The second is to protect against an FBI Director becoming too independent and unresponsive.
They added, "it is the great value of the FBI as a criminal investigative agency as well as its great potential for infringing individual rights and serving partisan or personal ambition that makes the office of FBI Director unique.” Indeed it is, as the decades of abuse by Hoover so amply demonstrated.
The main constraint they devised was one ten-year term and a requirement that a president has good cause to fire a director before that term is up. All presidents since the law was enacted have had to deal with an FBI director that was chosen by his predecessor and every single one of them, no matter who appointed him, has been a Republican. The idea that any FBI director or the institution itself is some bastion of woke liberalism is absurd.
There have only been two firings over that half-century. The first was when Bill Clinton, following an investigation by the George H.W Bush administration, did so due to the director's ethical lapses. The second was when Donald Trump fired James Comey using the eye-rolling excuse that his public pronouncements regarding the Clinton email investigation were the reason. (As if that wasn't Trump's favorite thing about him.) But it was, as we subsequently found out, done because Comey refused to pledge his personal fealty to Trump and gave the go-ahead for the Russia investigation.
It has long been assumed that Trump would probably fire Comey's successor Christopher Wray as well if he won the presidency even though he was the one who appointed him in the first place. He was angry with Wray almost from the beginning when he resisted GOP House efforts to declassify a memo that claimed the Russia investigation was politically motivated. Wray rode that out but it soured Trump on him permanently.
Trump was also, as we know, very worked up over the George Floyd protests in 2020 and he blamed Wray for failing to uncover the "funding" of the alleged ANTIFA movement which he believed was responsible for them:
...And I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away with “murder”. LAW & ORDER! https://t.co/yHLzB0RQ8e
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2020
He probably would have fired Wray if he'd won in 2020 but it was during his exile in Florida that he came to truly despise him. Trump complained bitterly about the classified documents search and blamed Wray for it, telling NBC News' Kristen Welker on "Meet the Press" this week that Wray "invaded my home, he invaded Mar-a-Lago." (The fact that they found hundreds of classified documents being held in a bathroom, a crime that would have had anyone else hauled off in handcuffs, is irrelevant.) And he was livid at Wray for his testimony before Congress about the assassination attempt last summer. Wray said:
There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear. As I sit here right now, I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.
Trump told Welker:
I certainly cannot be happy with him. Take a look at what’s happened. And then when I was shot in the ear, he said, maybe it was shrapnel. Where’s the shrapnel coming from? Is it coming from heaven? I don’t think so.
The FBI did confirm that Trump had been hit by the bullet but I think Wray's comment clinched it for him. Failing to be properly reverent about Trump's wound is akin to treason in MAGA world.
We knew it was actually happening when Trump posted on Truth Social a couple of weeks ago that he planned to name Kash Patel as the Director of the FBI.
Considering all that history and Wray's reputed veneration of the FBI, it was expected that he would make Trump fire him in order at least to uphold the idea of the independence of the Bureau. He had three years to run on his term and Trump does not have any just cause to fire him as he is required to do under the law. To allow him to dismiss yet another FBI Director because he doesn't feel he is loyal enough to him personally is an affront to the rule of law and the agency Wray reveres.
So naturally, Wray politely announced that he plans to resign this week in order to make it easier for Trump to break both the spirit and the letter of the law — again. Trump was his usual gracious self, declaring on Truth Social that his resignation is a great day for America:
"The resignation of Christopher Wray is a great day for America as it will end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "I just don't know what happened to him. We will now restore the Rule of Law for all Americans."
There is no doubt that Wray understands the threat that Trump and his henchmen pose to the country and the world. He's seen him up close and probably knows a lot more than the rest of us do. He should have put up a fight even knowing that he would lose. There is great value in people like him standing up for the law and making Trump break it openly rather than facilitating it for him.
As James Fallows wrote in his Breaking the News newsletter this week:
One of Donald Trump’s main tools, as the GOP has collapsed into subservience, is the perception of un-stoppability. He’s going to get his way in the end. So why waste your time standing up to him? Thus Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley, “Little Marco,” and countless others have etched their role in history.
By making it slower and harder for Trump to get his way with the FBI, Director Wray might have protected the institution itself, and its dignity, and its commitment to continued leadership through changes of administration, for that much longer. Crucially, he might have slowed down Donald Trump on other fronts, by inflicting on him another “loss.”
Right now Trump is busily flooding the zone, threatening people, making it seem as if he is a juggernaut who can't be stopped and any opposition is impotent. That's just not true. Yes, he has the trifecta and he's threatening any of his own party who might stand in his way. But there is no reason for people to make it easy for him. Anyone in a position to do so should delay everything they can, fight on any front, and make him work for every single abuse he's planning to inflict.
Christopher Wray let the country down with this namby-pamby exit. He was in a position to expose Trump's disregard for the institution he purports to love and demonstrate his disrespect for the law and the Constitution. And he didn't do it. Let's hope we see more passive resistance coming from the rest of the federal employees.
Yes, I know it won't stop him. But it will slow him down and it won't be long until he's officially a lame duck and all those Republicans will have to face the voters again. Then there will be a chance to deprive him of congressional power and reset our system of checks and balances.
