The F.B.I. is not a Liberal Bastion of Wakeness: When Donald Trump proclaimed Independence from the Obama Administration and the Justice Department
What this independence illustrates is that the F.B.I. is not, as many MAGA loyalists believe, some liberal bastion of wokeness. No Democrat has ever served as an F.B.I. director. Even Democratic presidents appoint Republican officials to head the bureau, as Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton both did in their presidencies.
It goes against the basic approach all previous presidents have taken, which is that they have appointed nonpartisan figures, known for their independence. Directors often go out of their way to demonstrate independence from the presidents who appointed them. During the Clinton scandals, Bill Clinton and Louis Freeh were not even on speaking terms, so Mr Freeh turned in his White House pass to hide his familiarity with the president. Mr. Comey infamously took it upon himself to excoriate Hillary Clinton publicly over her handling of emails as secretary of state to demonstrate his independence from the Obama administration and Justice Department.
Before Mr. Trump, no incoming president had replaced the F.B.I. director on a whim; it’s a role that’s meant to exist outside the normal structure of political appointments. Mr. Trump now wants to fire and replace the man he himself selected to lead the institution because he seems to believe that Mr. Wray, a longtime Republican official, is not sufficiently loyal nor willing to wield the bureau’s immense powers against Mr. Trump’s political opponents and domestic enemies.
President-elect Donald Trump shocked even some of his most ardent critics when he announced he would nominate former national security aide Kash Patel to lead the FBI.
There is a former Justice Department prosecutor looking to find ways to punish Trump’s enemies. Critics say that would be an appalling use of the justice system to carry out political ends.
It would be the first time if that were to happen. The agency’s longest serving director authorized covert harassment campaigns against perceived enemies like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Gage: There are more guardrails now than there were then. A lot of them are internal to the FBI and to the Justice Department. The question is whether they’re going to be strong enough to hold against a push that they have never been subjected to before. The changes that took place after Hoover’s death prevented the types of practices that took place during his time in Congress. Congressional intelligence committees came into being. They had a lot more access to what was happening in the world of intelligence. A little bit of law that now appears quite different is about internal reforms within the Justice Department and the FBI.
Gage, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, also believes the FBI’s politicization could damage the American public’s view of it even further.
She talked to Morning Edition about how much power and influence the FBI had in the past under Hoover, its most notable director.
What is the history of the FBI? How did it start and how did it become what a lot of people call the preeminent law enforcement agency in the United States?
Gage: Hoover came in at a moment when the government was just starting to expand in the 1920s. And he really built the bureaucracy in his own image and kind of managed its politics really successfully for almost half a century.
Gage: It was a reaction to Hoover. The analysis at the time in the ’60s and ’70s – he died in 1972 – was that future directors should not be able to amass that kind of power because it made Hoover sort of invulnerable.
Martin: Liberals have long been suspicious of the FBI because of that legacy of covert harassment campaigns. When did the right start to become suspicious of the FBI?
How Will Mr. Patel Propagate the State of the State? Martin: The Role of the Laws in the Hoover Era
Martin: What do you make of Mr. Patel’s vow that he will use the levers of the justice system to punish those who he believes have unfairly targeted the president elect? Can he do that?
Martin: Yes, I do. One of the things that Hoover did was he authorized behavior that many people today look at in a completely different way, like, discovering things about people’s personal lives. Is there a set of rules against that type of conduct occurring again?