After Donald Trump announced that a Republican operative named Kash Patel was his choice to lead the FBI, the question wasn’t whether FBI Director Chris Wray would leave his post. Rather, what remained to be seen was when and how he’d leave.
Those questions now have an answer: Wray delivered remarks to FBI employees and confirmed that he would serve until the end of the Biden administration and then step down. The outgoing director conceded that the decision was “not easy,” but said he believed he was “doing what’s right for the FBI.”
The official record will show that Wray voluntarily resigned, despite the fact that he had nearly three years remaining in his tenure, after having been appointed under highly controversial circumstances in 2017. But that record will be incomplete: Wray didn’t want to quit; he was shown the door. The outgoing director was left with a choice between walking away or being fired by the incoming president, and he chose the former.
With James Comey, Trump became the first president to fire an FBI director without cause. With Wray, he has effectively done the same thing again.
And that, in turn, generated a different set of questions.
Why does Trump have such contempt for Wray? Offered an opportunity to explain his apparent disgust for his own handpicked FBI director, the president-elect tried and failed to make a compelling case during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The New York Times published a related report on the “turbulent relationship” between the two Republicans and “how their relationship quickly went from bad to awful.”
The report covers a fair amount of ground, but the common thread tying the elements together is clear: There were a variety of investigations Trump wanted the FBI to ignore or massage, and Wray instead did his job. As The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait summarized, Wray “proved unable to meet Trump’s expectations for the position, which are (1) to permit Trump and his allies to violate the law with impunity, and (2) to investigate anybody who interferes with (1).”
Some leaders reject officials who are corrupt; Trump has a habit of rejecting officials who aren’t corrupt enough.
If Wray was going to be fired anyway, is his looming resignation understandable? There’s no shortage of opinions on this, but I’m persuaded by those who’ve argued that the FBI director made a mistake by, to borrow a phrase from Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny,” obeying in advance.
As Garrett M. Graff, a journalist and historian who wrote a book about the FBI, added, “This is an unbelievable abdication by Wray and makes it so much easier for Trump to install a corrupt leadership under Kash Patel and weaponize the FBI. Wray is doing a huge disservice to the FBI past, present, and future.”
Wray could’ve forced Trump to take the extraordinary step of firing his own handpicked FBI director without a good reason. By embracing “anticipatory obedience,” Wray made the mistake of doing the president-elect an unearned favor. But isn’t Trump’s campaign against Wray worse than Wray’s decision to step down? There should be no doubt that while the outgoing FBI director should’ve forced Trump’s hand, the more important scandal is the president-elect’s eagerness to politicize and weaponize federal law enforcement, ousting a Republican official who deserves to keep his job while making way for a partisan operative with a literal enemies list. Indeed, part of what makes the latest developments so exasperating is the degree to which Trump and his allies are rewriting the story of Wray’s tenure, effectively trying to turn him into the villain of a narrative based entirely on partisan myths and nonsense. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for example, suggested Wray was partly responsible for having “weaponized” the bureau “against the American people,” which plainly never happened in reality. Similarly, the president-elect wrote by way of his social media platform, “Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America.” Trump’s missive was littered with lazy and obvious lies. In fact, it twice used the word “illegally,” suggesting he believes Wray and the FBI committed crimes — which is bonkers, and which is the sort of false claim that Trump has never even tried to bring to a courtroom, because he realizes sanctions would soon follow. But too many Republicans find it easier to smear Wray than defend the indefensible.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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