Trump vs. FBI, explained

A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

CNN
—

President-elect Donald Trump is still putting together his cabinet for his second term, and many other government jobs will open up when he takes the oath of office in January.

But there is a growing expectation that he will quickly fill at least one new vacancy by firing FBI Director Christopher Wray.

There would be some circularity in the special personnel move, since it was Trump who hired Wray, a Republican, by nominating him to a 10-year term in 2017. That said, Trump has never shied away from firing a , he once supported.

FBI directors get these 10-year terms as a result of a post-Watergate law that was a response to J. Edgar Hoover’s overly long and controlling 48-year leadership of the FBI.

The term length is supposed to inoculate the director from political pressure. But it never works out that way.

Trump famously fired then-FBI Director James Comey months after taking office for his first term in 2017. Comey was also a Republican, though he was nominated for the post by Democratic President Barack Obama. (Comey later said in 2018 that he “can’t be associated with” the Republican Party because of Trump’s influence on the GOP.)

In 1993, Bill Clinton fired then-FBI Director William Sessions after an internal ethics report emerged during the previous year’s presidential campaign. That included questions about a $10,000 fence installed around the director’s home and flights he had taken.

Earlier, Jimmy Carter suggested during the 1976 presidential campaign that he wanted to fire then-FBI Director Clarence Kelley among other things, over revelations about window blinds being installed incorrectly in his home. Carter did not immediately fire Kelley when he took the White House, but Kelley was ultimately forced to resign, according to Douglas Charles, a history professor at Penn State University, who noted that the Draper scandal “today seems like very small fry. ”

But at the time, it would have tested the new law that Congress passed in 1976 for Carter to fire Kelley.

“There was certainly the question, can any president fire an FBI director when there’s a statutory period of 10 years,” Charles said.

While that question has clearly been answered now, the previous firings were about ethics and personal failings. Trump’s is about political differences, including about the role of the Justice Department as a whole.

The reasons given for Comey’s firing, set out in a memo prepared for Trump’s Department of Justice, was contradictory. Comey was criticized both for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified material and then for releasing “derogatory” information about Clinton at a news 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 during Senate confirmation hearings he had failed to disclose pre-election contacts he had with Russia’s ambassador to United States at the time.

Who did Rosenstein pick as special counsel to lead the Russia investigation? Robert S. Mueller III, who happened to be the former FBI director. Mueller was widely respected and had taken charge of the FBI days before The 9/11 attacks in 2001. Congress passed a special law to extend his term by two years under the Obama administration.

Anyone who remembers Trump’s first term will recall that speculation about the Russia investigation consumed much of the air 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.

The cooperation of Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen with Mueller’s investigation is what led to revelations about 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 documents has been delayed indefinitely following his election victory.

The release of Mueller’s report was slow-walked by Trump’s second attorney general, Bill Barr, who gave the impression that Mueller’s report exonerated Trump. It didn’t.

Mueller was constrained by Justice Department rules that prevent 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 Russians. Nor did it 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. It is being forgotten after Trump has referred to Mueller’s investigation as the “Russia Scam” for years.

There are things that helped generate the Mueller investigation, especially the discredited Steele case, that will forever anger Trump.

There were also related scandals, such as the release of anti-Trump texts by an FBI agent at the time, Peter Strzok, who initially played a role in Mueller’s investigation, and Lisa Page, who was then an FBI attorney who Strzok had along with. an affair. The FBI agreed in July of this year to pay Strzok and Page $2 million to compensate for the release of those text messages.

Another FBI official, Andrew McCabe, who served briefly as acting director after Trump fired Comey, was fired by Sessions days before his retirement. McCabe, now a CNN contributor, ultimately won back his pension in court.

Wray was overwhelmingly confirmed to succeed Comey in August 2017, in part by pledging during confirmation hearings to maintain independence from the White House. Trump, meanwhile, prizes loyalty.

Even while Trump was still president in 2020, he had already turned on Wray, in part because he felt Wray was not cooperating with special counsel John Durham — who was appointed by Barr, Sessions’ replacement, to investigate the Mueller investigation .

All of this adds up to why Trump wants loyalists 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 in the federal government, there was talk in the Senate of taking the Department of Justice, including the FBI, out of politics altogether and doing that and all . of its employees an independent part of the civil service.

Trump wants to go in the opposite direction today and bring the FBI more under the president’s control.