FBI directors are supposed to be independent
They flop over the instant he looks in their direction.
FBI Director Christopher Wray became the latest public official to remove his own spine and dissolve into a puddle of genuflecting goo for the greater glory of MAGA with his announcement Wednesday that he’ll resign before Trump’s inauguration.
FBI directors are supposed to be independent, and Wray still has more than two years left on his term. But Trump loathes Wray, who, among other things, pursued an investigation of Trump’s mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House.
Which is slightly ironic, because Trump appointed Wray in the first place.
As Trump mentions in his post, he plans to replace Wray with unqualified craven bootlicker Kash Patel, who has promised to use the agency to target Trump’s enemies, terrorize the media (including imprisoning journalists), and crush political dissent.
Wray’s resignation enables Trump’s authoritarian designs. It means he can install Patel without having to pay the political price that would have come with firing Wray, who has clearly done nothing to deserve it. It will make it easier for Republican senators who might have been on the fence about voting for Trump’s new henchman to go along with the program.
…
Wray is a Trump nominee in his own right who rose to the top of the bureau in 2017 during one of the orange menace’s previous power plays, when he ignored the norms protecting FBI directors and fired James Comey for refusing to stifle the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. Wray was suitably supine for most of Trump’s term; at Trump’s behest, he undermined the FBI investigation into sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.
So now we’ll get someone even worse.
One of the most sobering realizations of the Trump-era has been how little of “how it’s supposed to be” is actually set in stone and how much of it was only ever based on unwritten norms and traditions, self-imposed rules, voluntary constraints (yeah, good luck, getting that from Trump!) etc. It was probably idiotic to think it could have been otherwise (once again, it’s a small comfort to know I wasn’t the only one to make that mistake.). It’s almost certainly not possible to predict, let alone explicitly prohibit, every possible way in which executive power can be abused, so we’re always going to have an irreducible “fox guarding the hen-house” problem on our hands. I now suspect that the elusive “checks and balances” were more of a useful fiction that only “sort of” worked because everybody believed in them. Well, if so, the cat is now out of the bag, and we can’t get it in again.
Oh, like the political price he paid when he…
If Trump learnt one thing from his first term and the subsequent four years it’s that there are no repercussions for his actions.
Can you expect much courage from your average Trump appointee? I doubt Patel would’ve done differently in Wray’s shoes. Being courageous requires a certain level of willful stupidity and iron moral character (I lack the former and am thus a coward, sincerely).
Do you think the idiots whining “stuff costs a dollar or two more” knew this was what they were getting, or did they just not give a shit? And how much a shit will they give when stuff costs even more?
I have never been impressed with those who ‘resign in protest’. Usually, it just creates a vacancy the bad people can immediately fill; if they hadn’t resigned. It can sometimes be very difficult to remove a government employee, and being that employee grants far more opportunity to confound the plans of the bad person than otherwise.
Holms, there is of course the dynamic of ‘quitting in disgust’, where you know your resignation will have no impact whatsoever, you’re honest about it, and nothing you do will make any difference in the policies of the employer. That’s how I left the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality – in disgust. Their policies appeared to be to hasten global warming, increase other types of air pollution, and above all, make corporations happy. I was a government employee in a relatively low level job (bottom of the professional level food chain) and nothing was going to touch the boss. In that case, quitting in disgust is what one does when one is not willing to be a participant in what is going to continue happening…or in the case of Wray, what is about to happen. It is my considered opinion that ‘resigning in protest’ is a form of ‘quitting in disgust’ with the desire to elevate it to noble status.