Wray’s departure will cement Trump’s control over the institutions of US justice

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — FBI Director Christopher Wray’s resignation announcement was the latest, and inevitable, step in the accumulation of massive and unusual power around President-elect Donald Trump.

Wray said Wednesday he would step down at the end of the Biden administration next month to save the bureau from becoming sucked even deeper into politics with a succession drama, since Trump has already chosen a replacement.

For Trump’s supporters, Wray’s exit will represent another moment of triumph following the president-elect’s political comeback amid criminal cases that once threatened not just his political career but his liberty. They insist that Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to replace Wray, will purge what they see as the politicization of the FBI.

But many nonpartisan legal analysts fear that Wray’s departure — before the end of a 10-year term mandated by Congress to keep politics out of the administration of justice — represents yet another challenge by Trump to the rule of law and an attempt to harness government institutions for his personal political goals.

The replacement of Wray – who was appointed by Trump – with the loyalist Patel, if he is confirmed, will enshrine one of the core principles of Trumpism at the heart of the US justice system: that any person or institution that resists his frequent grasps for power or the aspirations of the hardline MAGA movement is themself an avatar of corrupt political bias.

With that in mind, some pro-democracy advocates had argued that Wray should not resign, but wait to be fired by Trump, to delay and to highlight the takeover of the machinery of justice by a new president who is himself a convicted felon. But Wray said Wednesday he’d concluded that his duty was to avoid detracting from the FBI mission. “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,” he told agents.

Like his predecessor, James Comey — whom Trump fired during in his first term — Wray presided over the bureau at a time when it was pulled into the vicious swirl of partisan politics in a way that dented its credibility. It might be argued, however, that the current FBI director did more to try to stay out of the way than his predecessor, who intervened late in the 2016 election to reopen an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, angering Democrats, then went to dinner at the White House where he fell foul of Trump’s personal demands for loyalty.

An impossible position

Wray often expressed bewilderment that, given his own Republican leanings, he’d be accused of bias against conservatives. But the hyper politicized atmosphere of recent years proved impossible for him to navigate.

Conservatives have bought into Trump’s claims that he and his supporters were persecuted by the FBI because of its involvement in prosecuting those who smashed their way into the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and because of the lawful search of his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022. But an alternative view is that the president-elect’s flagrant challenges to the law, with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his hoarding of classified documents at his home after leaving office, did far more to drag the FBI into the political fray than Wray’s actions in either case.

These controversies meant that it was inevitable that Trump — who praised Wray when he selected him in 2017 as “a man of impeccable credentials” — would turn on the FBI as soon as he won back power. The president-elect celebrated Wray’s coming departure Wednesday, declaring it a “great day for America.”

Steve Moore, a retired supervisory FBI special agent, summed up the FBI chief’s position on “CNN News Central,” saying that “Director Wray’s credentials have not changed. It’s just that he has not done certain things that Donald Trump would have wanted him to do.”

Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton, meanwhile, told CNN that Trump wanted to get rid of the FBI director because “he actually upheld the law. Donald Trump thinks that he is above the law.”

But the reaction of Republicans to Wray’s resignation announcement showed the power of Trump’s narrative that the bureau had been politicized in a way that discriminates against conservatives.

Many Republicans accuse the FBI of conspiring against Trump in the Russia investigation, which cast a shadow over his first term, and of facilitating what they claim is the Biden administration’s weaponization of justice against him in the aftermath of the 2020 election. An internal Justice Department report found that there were serious errors made in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court applications on Carter Page, a former Trump 2016 campaign adviser. Broader claims by Trump that he was the victim of a politically motivated FBI witch hunt are far more questionable. But the idea that there was such corruption now represents a GOP loyalty test.

“Wray’s departure is an opportunity for a new era of transparency and accountability at the FBI,” Chuck Grassley, the incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said. “Future FBI Directors ought to learn a lesson from Wray’s mistakes. Stonewalling Congress, breaking promises, applying double standards and turning your back on whistleblowers is no longer going to cut it.”

How the new FBI will get sucked into Trump’s power base

The practical impact of likely replacing Wray with Patel will be to draw the FBI far closer to the Oval Office, mirroring a similar process likely to take place at the Justice Department if Pam Bondi, another ultra-Trump loyalist, is confirmed to serve as Trump’s attorney general. In many presidencies, tensions erupt between the bureau and Justice Department and the White House, since the agencies are regarded as quasi-independent. That may not be the case next year.

“The president has made no secret that he does envision a fundamentally different relationship between the FBI … and the White House,” Tom Dupree, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday.

Given the political controversy that has haunted the FBI in recent years, both parties ought to be able to agree on the need for a fresh start and for the bureau’s image to be refocused on the vast majority of its work — on fighting crime and transnational gangs and on preventing terrorism and counterespionage.

The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” blueprint for conservative government argues that “anything other than a top-to-bottom overhaul will only further erode the trust of significant portions of the American people and harm the very fabric that holds together our constitutional republic.” The document urges a return to the FBI’s “focus on its two core functions: protecting public safety and defending the rule of law.”

But the turmoil of recent years has shown that upholding the rule of law is in the eye of the beholder.

There’s no sign that Patel is the kind of apolitical personality who might be able to rid the FBI of partisanship. He’s open about his deeply political motivations, appearing at events like the Conservative Political Action Conference. Although he spent time at the Justice Department investigating terrorism cases and worked on Capitol Hill, his critics argue that his premier qualification for the job, in Trump’s eyes, is in offering total loyalty to the president-elect’s political goals and schemes, which Comey and Wray refused to show.

Patel has vowed a purge of the FBI to root out what he sees as politicization. “We’ve got to put in all-American patriots top to bottom,” Patel said of the DOJ in an interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast, adding that the department under Trump “will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media.” And he added: “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you.”

Patel also wrote in his book “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy” that “the FBI is now the prime functionary of the Deep State. The politicized leadership at the very top has turned it into a tool of surveillance and suppression of American citizens.”

Patel’s warnings suggest that while he wants to end the politicization of the FBI, he’ll likely pursue weaponization of the bureau for different political purposes — namely those set by Trump.

While Patel’s selection was greeted with horror by many outside the MAGA movement and the Republican Party, there’s no sign yet that GOP senators will block his confirmation. Indeed, many Republicans embrace Trump’s view of the FBI as biased against him and view his election win as a mandate for a fundamental gutting of governmental institutions.

And Trump left no doubt about where he sees legal authority resting in his new administration, with a recent comment that sent chills down the spines of those who fear what will happen in the next four years.

“I’m the chief law enforcement officer, you do know that,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview that aired Sunday.

“I’m the president.”

The-CNN-Wire
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