President Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel threatens to turn the FBI into an instrument of the president’s personal power.
December 1, 2024, 9:32 a.m. ET
Updated on December 1, 2024 at 10:17 a.m. ET.
For more than 40 years, before Donald Trump became president, the FBI director held a position above politics. A new president may choose a political ally to be his attorney general, but not the FBI director. The FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s selection remained in the position until Reagan’s second term, when he moved him to become CIA director. President Reagan’s appointees to the FBI served under President George H.W. Bush through the administration of Bill Clinton. Clinton’s firing of her successor marks the first time a president has fired an FBI director, after the outgoing Bush administration released a Justice Department report accusing the director of ethical lapses. It was because I left it behind. (Clinton tried to placate the tainted director into resigning of his own volition. Only after the coaxing failed did Clinton take action.)
And it continued until the 21st century. With the exception of one major scandal, Senate-confirmed FBI directors remained in office until they resigned or their 10-year terms expired. A Senate-confirmed FBI director has never been removed by a president in order to replace him with an ally. Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that we should not return to the days when J. Edgar Hoover granted special favors to presidents who perpetuated their power.
Even Donald Trump reluctantly followed this rule during his first term, as the Mueller report later detailed. President Trump wanted to fire FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. Trump’s advisers persuaded him that admitting his true motives would create a huge scandal. Instead, the new administration placated the deputy attorney general and had him write a letter offering a more neutral-looking explanation that Comey had mishandled the bureau’s handling of Hillary Clinton. That deceptive justification—the Mueller report authoritatively disproved the cover story—did nothing to calm the uproar over President Trump’s plan to install an underling as FBI director. At the time, even Trump supporters were still proclaiming that the FBI director must be more than the president’s yes-man. Things only calmed down when President Trump chose a politically independent candidate to replace Comey. Christopher Wray currently holds the position and has held on through all four years of the Biden administration.
Yesterday, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he intended to fire Wray and replace him with Kash Patel. How wrong was Patel’s choice? My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro writes that when President Trump “entertained the nomination of FBI Deputy Director Patel, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House Chief of Staff and said, ‘What about my body? But that’s okay.”
But before we get into Patel’s downsides, let’s dwell a little longer on the ominous dangers of Trump’s desire to remove Wray.
The FBI director wields tremendous power over the liberties of American citizens. The unwritten rules governing their appointment (no removal except for compelling reasons) hampered American law and freedom for half a century. Even Trump, in his first term, didn’t have the courage to publicly defy it. However, the Trump administration is beginning its second term with the intention of completely abolishing the bill. Much of the reporting surrounding President Trump’s announcement makes it clear that society has already bowed to his will. What was considered outrageous and unacceptable in 2017 – treating the FBI director as just another Trump aide – had become semi-normal even before President-elect Trump took office.
Ray’s dismissal is truly outrageous. The unpleasant nomination of Patel further stirs up anger and sprinkles more.
Patel’s nomination will likely fail, just as President Trump’s attempt to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general failed. If Mr. Patel faltered, Mr. Trump might turn to a more worthy candidate. That second candidate may be greeted with a sense of relief. But the essential harm would come from Ray’s firing, not from the hiring of Patel (or whoever ends up in the job). Less than a month after the closest popular vote margin election in two generations, we are witnessing a pattern of President Trump destroying institutions and replacing them on a whim throughout the law enforcement and national security apparatus. I’m doing it. President Trump has declared his intention to reinvent the FBI as something new: an instrument of the president’s personal power to investigate (or refrain from investigating) and prosecute (or refrain from prosecuting) as the president wishes. .
President Trump chose as Secretary of Defense an ideological freak who accused his own mother in writing of repeatedly abusing women. (She has since denied that statement.) At the CIA, as President Trump’s first-term director of national intelligence, President Trump was a bipartisan leader who selectively declassified information to discredit President Trump’s political opponents. I want a person of President Trump wants his second term as director of national intelligence to be a longtime apologist for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime and President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
Merit, ability, integrity, none of that matters. Rather, those good qualities seem to be positive disqualifying factors. President Trump was chosen solely for his obedience.
Now comes the big test: Is America’s constitutional system as weak as President Trump hopes? Will Mr. Wray meekly accept his termination, or will he protect the department from President Trump’s second bold attempt? Will Senate Republicans approve President Trump’s attack on the separation of law enforcement and politics? Will a federal court grant a warrant to the FBI, which seeks a warrant and makes an arrest because the president tells it to? Will the small Republican majority in the House support or resist Trump’s attempt to create a personal police force? Will enough independent news organizations survive the clutches of the pro-Trump oligarchy to explain what is happening and why it matters? Will the people give enough consideration? Will enough people respond?
Americans voted for cheaper eggs. All they get is noise, conflict, and confusion. What President Trump is trying to do, if successful, will be a constitutional scandal far bigger than Watergate. If he succeeds, his power grab, which he failed to do in 2021, could begin in 2025.
