Donald Trump's announcement on Saturday evening that he will appoint a new director of the FBI, the woefully unqualified and totally unsuitable Kash Patel, is a few years premature because the director's position is not open. Director Chris Wray was nominated by Trump during his first Oval Office stint and confirmed 92-5 by the Senate, beginning his ten-year term on August 2, 2017. Unless Wray leaves before the summer of 2027, there will be no vacancy to fill in. .
As head of the FBI, Wray has done nothing to justify his firing for cause, which should be the only way for a president to get rid of a director.
In the fifty years since Congress created the modern FBI leadership after the inexplicable 48-year rule of J. Edgar Hoover, presidents have largely respected the independence that directors have in their non-renewable decade in office.
Yes, President Bill Clinton did fire FBI chief Bill Sessions shortly after Clinton came to power in 1993, but that was only after a scathing Justice Department report found in the Bush administration's outgoing report that Sessions improperly took private expenditure had been invoiced to the government.
The other example, with much less justification, was in 2017 when Trump dumped FBI Director Jim Comey. The cover story was that Comey had badly bungled Hillary Clinton's email investigation in the days before the 2016 election, which Comey badly bungled and upset everyone. The real reason was that Trump did not want the Kremlin's efforts to help his campaign to be investigated.
There is no reason to fire Wray. Expect the bogeyman of the deep state, and that's where Patel comes in. Patel, a former Trump aide who has nothing to do with the top brass of the FBI or CIA (as has been suggested by Trump in the past), wrote a 2023 book entitled: “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the struggle for our democracy.”
Appendix B of the book, called “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” is a list of 60 names in alphabetical order. The middle name is Lloyd Austin, the current Secretary of Defense. Bill Barr, Trump's attorney general, is the fifth name. Near the end of Trump's first term, as Trump was considering appointing Patel deputy director of the FBI, Barr told the White House chief of staff, “Over my dead body.”
Trump's national security adviser John Bolton is sixth on Patel's list, while Joe Biden is number 8. And that's just the first page. The other three pages list the names of Trump's White Chief Counsel Pat Cipollone, Hillary Clinton, Jim Comey, Mark Esper, whom Trump fired as Secretary of Defense, current Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Trump's CIA Director Gina Haspel , who threatened to resign when Trump proposed making Patel the spy agency's deputy director.
Other names include Kamala Harris, special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Joe Biden's handling of classified documents, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley. Chris Wray is number 59 on the roster. Patel's enemies list includes anyone who didn't lie for Trump.
And that's just the executive branch, not counting enemies in Congress or the press, but those exist too. Last December, Patel said on Steve Bannon's podcast: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we are going after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election – we are going to come after you.”
Forget running the FBI, that guy Patel is not fit for any government job.
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