Swift FBI hire likely after legal questions over sacking
Trump signals Comey could be replaced as soon as this week as Republicans come under fire
DONALD TRUMP could name a replacement for James Comey within a week, the US president said yesterday, as some experts challenged the legality of the decision to fire the FBI director.
Jeff Sessions, the United States attorney general, began interviewing candidates to for the role yesterday, with the White House hoping to move on from the decision which plunged the Trump administration into a week-long crisis.
“We can make a fast decision,” Mr Trump said. “I think the process is going to go quickly.”
Mr Trump suggested a new candidate for FBI director, who would need to be confirmed by the Senate, may be chosen as soon as this week, before he leaves on his first foreign trip since taking office.
He spoke as he prepared to address students at Liberty University, an evangelical institute, with a speech designed to inspire youth and, his aides hoped, lift the darkened mood that was hanging over his administration.
The president told students to always “relish the opportunity to be an outsider” and “never, ever give up” and “never stop fighting for what you believe in”.
The first candidate to meet Mr Sessions was Alice Fisher, a 50-year-old white-collar crime lawyer in Washington. She previously ran the criminal justice division of the justice depart- ment during the second part of George W Bush’s term. She faced resistance from Democrats during her confirmation over her alleged participation in discussions about detention policies at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba. She also was deputy special counsel to the Senate special committee that investigated President Bill Clinton’s Whitewater scandal.
With the appointment in 2005, she became the first woman to serve as assistant attorney general. There has never been a female FBI director, in the bureau’s 109-year history.
Michael Garcia, 55, an associate judge on New York’s highest court, and
‘Firing the lead investigator is the most extreme form of interfering with an investigation’
John Cornyn, the second most senior Republican in the Senate, are also said to be in the running.
Andrew McCabe, the acting director of the FBI since Mr Comey was fired, is also being considered. Widely praised for his independence, he has been described by colleagues as someone who does not seek the limelight and a “by the book, apolitical prosecutor’s prosecutor”. In testimony to the Senate intelligence committee, Mr McCabe directly contradicted Mr Trump’s assertion that the FBI was in “turmoil” under Mr Comey’s leadership.
Mr Trump said yesterday that all the candidates “are very well known”, and suggested the process could go quickly because they had “been vetted over their lifetime, essentially”.
The President has been criticised in the past over his administration’s vetting procedures. His White House has said they had relied on the clearances provided by the Obama administration when they hired Michael Flynn as national security adviser. Mr Flynn was then dismissed after he misled the vice president about the nature of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador in Washington.
The search for a new FBI director comes amid growing questions over the legality of the president’s sacking of Mr Comey, and Mr Sessions’s suitability to find a replacement. Legal experts suggested that Mr Trump’s decision to fire the man investigating his associate’s alleged links could constitute a possible case of “obstruction of justice”.
An ethics watchdog filed a legal complaint last week, alleging that his participation in the firing violated justice department rules and Mr Sessions’s previous promise to recuse himself from matters involving the Russia.
Mr Sessions, who played an active role in Mr Trump’s election campaign, was pressured to recuse himself from investigations into allegations of connections between that campaign and the Kremlin.
“Firing the lead investigator is the most extreme form of interfering with an investigation,” said Fred Wertheimer, who signed the complaint on behalf of his organisation, Democracy 21. He called for Mr Sessions to withdraw from any participation in the selection of an FBI director.
Donald Trump is firing the wrong people. James Comey’s ignominious dismissal was not the first sacking of Trump’s administration, nor will it be the last. But it may well be remembered as the most ill-advised. Few in Washington contest that Comey is, in the president’s words, a “showboat”. The FBI postHoover strives to be an apolitical organisation and Comey spent a career bucking that ethos to his own peril. His malpractice in the handling of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal is welldocumented. But firing him now, in the midst of an investigation into potential Russian interference in the election, was utter folly.
The president clearly considers this investigation to be a waste of time. He is wrong. Unless and until his administration is cleared of wrongdoing, his agenda will be hamstrung by allegations that his victory was the result of meddling by one of America’s most complex frenemies. This is not one of the passing controversies of the campaign, it is a millstone on the scale of Watergate. An investigation does not imply guilt, but attempting to stymie an investigation does. The president should appoint a special prosecutor with vast resources and keep silent on the process until the results are announced. It is the best and only hope for his next three and a half years in office.
Amid the furore following Comey’s firing, the president’s other largest problem was made manifest in absence: Trump’s lieutenants were nowhere to be found. It was hours before the first appeared on television to defend the decision. This was a blunder of monumental proportions, formed by the erroneous belief that Comey’s firing would enjoy bipartisan support. Presidents do not have the luxury of interacting with the public very often, and so are reliant upon their advisors for some understanding of the national zeitgeist. Clearly, the president is being badly advised.
Given the composition of Trump’s advisory team, this is not surprising. Administrations are traditionally stocked with veterans of the campaign, and his was a reservoir of those who had not, for the most part, been called upon by any of the other 16 Republican candidates. This is not because they were outsiders unknown to the political establishment. The high-profile veterans of his campaign (chiefly Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sebastian Gorka, and Sean Spicer) have all spent years in Republican circles in Washington. These five in particular were not well-known quantities before the election because they were, and are, bad at their jobs. Some are fundamentally untalented, others are fully unhinged from reality. None should be tasked with crafting and explaining the president’s agenda.
The experiment as to whether these loyalists could adapt to life in the White House has yielded conclusive results. Spicer too often resembles a child stumbling through a school debate which he knows is not going well. Conway’s primary contribution to the administration thus far has been coining the term “alternative facts”. Miller managed to cannibalise two months’ worth of political capital with his “Muslim ban”. Gorka serves as an unpleasant, daily reminder of Trump’s popularity among far-Right extremists. Bannon’s comportment suggests an air of surprise that he is the subject of constant journalistic scrutiny.
This incompetence is compounded by internecine skirmishes. Brought in as counterweights to Reince Priebus and Trump’s moderate family members, the campaign veterans have not managed to work productively with their new colleagues. Instead, all-out war has erupted in the West Wing, and spilled over to the nation’s newspapers. Every week, there are insults traded anonymously and new estimations of who “really” has the president’s ear. These process stories are at least as dangerous to Trump’s presidency as the alleged collusion with Russian officials, and they will not stop until those people feeding stories to the press are gone. At this point, that is likely to mean the president’s entire senior team.
It is too late to redeem the reputations of Trump’s advisors in the eyes of the public, but it is not too late to redeem his presidency. He took an oath to the country and he has an obligation to try to make a success of his time in office. This will not happen with his current team. It is time for the president to dig in to his reality show roots and fire people again – just not those currently investigating him.