The Atlantic / David Frum - A Constitutional Crisis Greater Than Watergate [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

The Atlantic / David Frum - (archived: https://archive.ph/d87hy ) A Constitutional Crisis Greater Than Watergate

Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel threatens to turn the FBI into an instrument of personal presidential power

By David Frum

December 1, 2024, 9:32 AM ET

For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a job above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA. Reagan’s FBI appointee served through the George H. W. Bush presidency and into the Bill Clinton administration. Clinton fired the inherited official—the first time a president ever fired an FBI director—only because the outgoing Bush administration had left behind a Department of Justice report accusing the director of ethical lapses. (Clinton tried to coax the tainted director into resigning of his own volition. Only after the coaxing failed did Clinton act.)

And so it continued into the 21st century. Except in a single case of serious scandal, Senate-confirmed FBI directors stayed in post until they quit or until their 10-year term expired. Never, never, never was a Senate-confirmed FBI director fired so that the president could replace him with a loyalist.

Even Donald Trump grudgingly submitted to the rule during his first term, as the Mueller Report later detailed. Trump wanted to fire FBI Director James Comey to shut down the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. Trump’s advisers convinced Trump that admitting the truth would spark an enormous scandal. Instead, the new administration inveigled the deputy attorney general to write a letter offering a more neutral-seeming explanation: that Comey had mishandled the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. That deceptive rationalization—the Mueller Report authoritatively disproved the cover story—did not calm the uproar over Trump’s scheme to install a henchman as FBI director. At the time, even Trump supporters still professed that the FBI director must be more than a presidential yes-man. Things were only quieted when Trump chose a politically independent candidate to replace Comey: Christopher Wray, who holds the job to this day, retained through all four years of the Biden administration.

Yesterday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he intended to fire Wray to replace him with Kash Patel, a person notorious for his cringing deference to Trump’s wishes. How bad a choice is Patel? My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported that when President Trump “entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, ‘Over my dead body.’”

But before getting to Patel’s demerits, we should stay for a minute longer on the ominous danger of Trump’s wish to fire Director Wray.

FBI directors wield awesome powers over the liberties of Americans. The unwritten rule governing their appointment—no dismissal except for compelling cause—bulwarked American law and freedom for half a century. Even first-term Trump dared not openly defy it. But second-term Trump is opening with a bid to junk it altogether. Much of the reporting on Trump’s announcement reveals a society already bending to Trump’s will: Something that was regarded as outrageously unacceptable in 2017—treating an FBI director as just another Trump aide—has been semi-normalized even before President-elect Trump takes office.

/snip