On Christopher Wray as political opportunist, in a convoluted Political Melodrama!
Dec 21, 2024
Headline: Opinion | Chris Wray’s Resignation Is a Terrifying Sign of What’s to Come Under Trump
Sub-headline :The FBI director’s preemptive resignation is a terrifying sign of what’s to come under Trump 2.0.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/12/chris-wrays-abdication-of-leadership-00194002
Editor: Garrett Graff recites the propganda that has infected generations of apologist for J.Edgar Hoover corrupt personal feifdom!
When Donald Trump said over Thanksgiving that he was nominating Kash Patel to be FBI director, the announcement sent shudders through official Washington — Patel, besides being simply unqualified for such a big role, has explicitly laid out a retaliatory agenda that would weaponize the FBI against Trump’s foes. But there was one important wrinkle in Trump’s move: The simplest argument against Patel taking over the FBI was that there was no vacancy atop the FBI.
Current FBI Director Christopher Wray had years left on his term. Wednesday, in a jaw-dropping announcement underneath the FBI seal at an employee town hall, Wray said he would serve out the rest of the Biden administration and then step down.
Wray’s surprise decision is, simply put, a damning decision, an abdication of leadership, and a terrifying indication of how unready Washington remains for a second Trump term.
Wray’s decision undermined decades of hard work — by Congress, presidents, the Justice Department and the FBI itself — to move it out of a partisan, political framework. The FBI’s highest guiding principle is supposed to be the rule of law — and federal law is clear: The FBI director serves a 10-year-term, a length meant to isolate the role from political winds. Similarly, in federal law, there is a mechanism for removing an FBI director who errs — they can be fired, but only for cause. The role is not meant to be like the CIA director, attorney general or Defense secretary and turn over at noon on Jan. 20 for a new administration; it is, in fact, explicitly designed to NOT do so. Ronald Reagan spent almost all of his presidency with Jimmy Carter’s FBI director; George W. Bush inherited Bill Clinton’s FBI director; Barack Obama, in turn, inherited Bush’s, and Joe Biden will have spent his entire presidency with Wray, Trump’s choice to head the bureau.
Those safeguards and traditions exist because the FBI, in the wrong hands, is incredibly dangerous to American democracy.
The FBI is the most powerful, best resourced, and far-reaching law enforcement agency, not just in the United States, but anywhere in the world. Nothing compares to the sweeping breadth of its investigative powers; the intelligence and information it collects, wittingly and unwittingly, on all manner of Americans, powerful and not, guilty and innocent alike; and the resources and technologies it can bring to bear against anyone in its investigative sights. Even its routine investigations can paralyze and bankrupt businesses, upend lives, careers and families, and destroy reputations — and even do so when it doesn’t bring federal charges at the end. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s half-century reign, he deployed those resources to ruin the lives of civil rights activists and antiwar protesters, harass literary figures such as James Baldwin, blackmail gay people and persecute anyone he didn’t feel was sufficiently patriotic. We’ve spent a half-century as a nation trying to make sure that never happens again — and now Trump is explicitly saying he wants to restart that darkest chapter of the FBI’s history.
Editor: What resemembled praise, turned to ‘that darkest chapter of the FBI’s history’ : Yet it isn’t long before Garrett Graff is featuring Christopher Wray as the once Heroic Face of the FBI , who morphes now ino its betrayer of ‘the bureau’s core values’ : a record of self-serving lies, mendacity, corution and invented political paranoia! In sum, in Garrett Graff Political Melodrama, Christopher Wray plays the part of a Political Opportunist!
The reality is that Wray’s action repudiates all of the bureau’s core values and principles and the hard work of scores of FBI leaders across a half-century. It is a decision that seems to help only one person: Wray, easing his way back into polite legal society and a top-shelf corporate or legal role with a minimum of awkward fuss and Trump vitriol. It certainly sends a terrible message to the workforce, public servants who we as a nation will desperately want to stand up for the rule of law in the years to come: Cave to Trump or just get out of the way.
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