SELECTING FBI head on fast track, Trump says.
WASHINGTON — Republican President Donald Trump said Monday that the selection process for a nominee for FBI director was “moving rapidly.”
He spoke during a meeting with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the White House. He has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday for the Middle East and Europe, his first overseas trip as president.
Democrats are irate over James Comey’s abrupt ouster and demanding Trump not nominate a partisan leader. But they don’t control enough votes to influence the outcome, because Republicans hold a 52- seat majority in the Senate.
“If they can keep all 52 together, then it won’t matter,” said Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. If Republicans “start to lose a couple, or two or three look like they’re not on board, that could create more pressure on the majority leader and the president to perhaps do something other than what they were planning on doing.”
The nominee will require only a simple majority vote in the 100- member Senate.
The next director will immediately be confronted with oversight of an FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, an inquiry the bureau’s acting head, Andrew McCabe, has called “highly significant.”
The person also will have to win the support of rank- and- file agents angered by the ouster of Comey, who was broadly supported within the FBI. The new director will almost certainly have to work to maintain the bureau’s credibility by asserting political independence in the face of a president known for demanding loyalty from the people he appoints.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein interviewed eight candidates Saturday, including some who were not among the names distributed a day earlier by the White House. The list includes current and former FBI and Justice Department leaders, federal judges and Republicans who have served in Congress.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R- S. C., under consideration for the post, took himself out of the
running on Monday.
Gowdy is a former state and federal prosecutor and was chairman of the House select committee on Benghazi. Gowdy said in a statement Monday that he told Sessions he was not interested in the job.
Senate Democrats have insisted that Trump not pick a politician as the next FBI director. Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that the choice should be “certainly somebody not of a partisan background, certainly somebody of great experience and certainly somebody of courage.”