“Wray\u2019s decision undermined decades of hard work \u2014 by Congress, presidents, the Justice Department and the FBI itself \u2014 to move it out of a partisan, political framework. The FBI\u2019s highest guiding principle is supposed to be the rule of law \u2014 and federal law is clear: The FBI director serves a 10-year-term, a length meant to isolate the role from political winds. Similarly, in federal law, there is a mechanism for removing an FBI director who errs \u2014 they can be fired, but only for cause. The role is not meant to be like the CIA director, attorney general or Defense secretary and turn over at noon on Jan. 20 for a new administration; it is, in fact, explicitly designed to NOT do so. Ronald Reagan spent almost all of his presidency with Jimmy Carter\u2019s FBI director; George W. Bush inherited Bill Clinton\u2019s FBI director; Barack Obama, in turn, inherited Bush\u2019s, and Joe Biden will have spent his entire presidency with Wray, Trump\u2019s choice to head the bureau.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those safeguards and traditions exist because the FBI, in the wrong hands, is incredibly dangerous to American democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The FBI is the most powerful, best resourced, and far-reaching law enforcement agency, not just in the United States, but anywhere in the world. Nothing compares to the sweeping breadth of its investigative powers; the intelligence and information it collects, wittingly and unwittingly, on all manner of Americans, powerful and not, guilty and innocent alike; and the resources and technologies it can bring to bear against anyone in its investigative sights. Even its routine investigations can paralyze and bankrupt businesses, upend lives, careers and families, and destroy reputations \u2014 and even do so when it doesn\u2019t bring federal charges at the end. Under J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s half-century reign, he deployed those resources to ruin the lives of civil rights activists and antiwar protesters, harass literary figures such as James Baldwin, blackmail gay people and persecute anyone he didn\u2019t feel was sufficiently patriotic. We\u2019ve spent a half-century as a nation trying to make sure that never happens again \u2014 and now Trump is explicitly saying he wants to restart that darkest chapter<\/a> of the FBI\u2019s history.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “let\u2019s be clear about what\u2019s happening here: The only reason Trump wants to change FBI directors is he doesn\u2019t think he can boss, bend and break Wray to his will sufficiently, that Wray would not be personally loyal to him in the way that he has wanted his FBI directors to be \u2014 and which, institutionally, they\u2019re explicitly not supposed to be. Every single part of that is a dire warning sign about what\u2019s to come under Trump II and what he and Patel intend to do with the bureau.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wray had an opportunity to make that a fight \u2014 to force Trump to bear the political cost of firing him on invented pretexts, to force the president to be the one who destroyed that guardrail rather than Wray himself. And, instead of upholding that oath to the Constitution, the rule of law and duty to protect the bureau from outside influence, Wray just \u2026 capitulated.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n