Christopher Wray Will Not Be Trump's Stooge (Slate)

[Amaryllis]

Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director hasn’t even gotten through the first step of his confirmation process, and the president has already tried to use him.

Leon Neyfakh is a Slate staff writer.

You can be forgiven for not noticing: It happened on June 7, the morning before James Comey was set to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Trump surely knew how much anticipation had been building for Comey’s testimony, and he couldn’t have been happy about it. (When he said back in January that Comey had “become more famous than me,” he didn’t mean it in a nice way.) And so, Trump got on Twitter and broke a little news:

Link to tweet

Despite all the normal caveats about how Trump may not be sophisticated enough to deploy tweets as a distraction mechanism, it’s hard to believe the timing here was an accident. More likely, Trump’s naming of Christopher Wray was meant to coincide with the avalanche of coverage the president knew was coming as soon as Comey was sworn in the next day. Like a lovelorn high school senior making a point of talking to his new girlfriend in front of an ex who’d dumped him, Trump looked to be projecting strength and steadiness. Have your little hearing, he seemed to be saying. I’ll just be over here with my new FBI director.

The move didn’t work. Wray, a total unknown outside the federal law enforcement community, was the furthest thing from a splashy “statement” pick. Instead of finding someone who might chart a defiant new course at the FBI—someone like Joe Lieberman, the former senator, who was reportedly under consideration before Wray got the nod—he’d settled on a former federal prosecutor who identified strongly with the institutional culture of the Justice Department and the FBI. In other words, he’d picked another James Comey.

Before Trump fired Comey, the president told his aides there was “something wrong with” the FBI director. It was an inscrutable comment, but it’s always seemed to me that the “something” Trump picked up on—Comey’s awkward reticence in the face of improper advances, his total refusal to play ball on Michael Flynn—was exactly the same “something” the FBI’s rank-and-file investigators had liked and respected about their boss. Given Wray’s long history at DOJ—he put in five years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Georgia working with Sally Yates, then five more in the halls of Main Justice working with Comey and Robert Mueller—I would bet that Wray has that something, too.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/07/christopher_wray_will_not_be_trump_s_stooge.html?wpsrc=newsletter_tis&sid=589dfd6ebcb59c58118b45d5