The firing of Christopher Wray is the real outrage. The nomination of Kash Patel just adds frosting and sprinkles.
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 their 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 his true motive 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.
