[Politics] Trump’s extreme dislike of FBI directors, explained

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President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 13. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. CNN — President-elect Donald Trump is still putting together his Cabinet for his second term, and many other government positions will open up when he takes the oath of office in January. But there’s a growing expectation that he will quickly make at least one new vacancy by firing FBI Director Christopher Wray. Donald Trump in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on October 29. Related article With Gaetz out as attorney general pick, Trump’s right flank looks for a new ally at FBI There would be some circularity in that particular personnel move since it was Trump who hired Wray, a Republican, by nominating him to a 10-year term in 2017. That said, Trump has never shied away from firing someone he once backed. FBI directors get those 10-year terms as the result of a post-Watergate law that was in response to J. Edgar Hoover’s much-too-long and controlling 48-year leadership of the FBI. The term length is supposed to inoculate the director from political pressure. But it never works out that way. If Trump fires Wray, he’d be first president to fire 2 FBI directors Trump famously fired then-FBI Director James Comey months after taking office for his first term in 2017. Comey was also a Republican, although he was nominated to the position by Democratic President Barack Obama. (Comey later said in 2018 that he “can’t be associated with” the Republican Party due to Trump’s influence on the GOP.) Presidents before Trump pushed FBI directors out In 1993, Bill Clinton fired then-FBI Director William Sessions after an internal ethics report emerged during the prior year’s presidential campaign. It included questions about a $10,000 fence installed around the director’s home and flights he had taken, among other issues. Earlier, Jimmy Carter suggested during the 1976 presidential campaign that he would have fired then-FBI Director Clarence Kelley over revelations about window drapery valances improperly installed at his home, among other things. Carter did not immediately fire Kelley when he took the White House, but Kelley was ultimately forced to resign, according to Douglas Charles, a history professor at Penn State University, who noted that the drapery scandal “today seems like very small fry stuff.” But at the time, it would have tested the new law, which Congress passed in 1976, for Carter to fire Kelley. “There certainly was the question, can any president fire an FBI director when there’s a legislated 10-year term,” Charles said. While that question has clearly been answered now, those previous firings were about ethics and personal failings. Trump’s are about policy differences, including over the role of the Justice Department overall. Why did Trump fire Comey? The stated reasons for Comey’s firing, laid out in a memo prepared for Trump’s Justice Department, were contradictory. Comey was criticized both for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton over her treatment of classified material and then for releasing “derogatory” information about Clinton at a press conference. The real reason Comey was fired, as Trump admitted to NBC News at the time, was Comey’s investigation into ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.