Christopher Wray’s Neville Chamberlain moment
December 12, 2024
Neville Chamberlain famously proclaimed that ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler guaranteed “Peace for our time.” Less than a year later, Hitler invaded Poland, beginning the largest global conflict in history.
Appeasement never works.
On Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray announced that he would resign his post in order to appease Donald Trump. Wray has served honorably for seven years—until Wednesday. On Wednesday, he told the men and women of the FBI that the proper course of action in the face of tyranny is surrender.
That is a dangerous message at the very moment that Trump is promising to convert the FBI into a personal political police force for the president. Wray’s message was, “Let him do it. Surrender. Avoid controversy. Protect yourself, not the Constitution.” To be clear, he didn’t say those words. His actions did.
Wray claimed that he was resigning to spare the FBI further controversy.
Appeasement never works.
Unlike Neville Chamberlain, Wray learned immediately that his efforts to calm the waters had failed. Before Wray’s words had ceased echoing through the halls of the FBI, Trump was heaping abuse (and lies) on Wray and FBI agents who did their duty.
Appeasement never works.
The collective collapse of Washington insiders to Donald Trump is dispiriting and infuriating. The “go-along-to-get-along” attitude elevates personal relationships and political longevity in Washington, D.C., at the expense of the rule of law.
Christopher Wray was well-liked and respected by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Tonight, some of Wray’s Democratic friends (e.g., Sen. Amy Klobuchar) are on the airwaves defending Wray’s decision, saying that he had no choice and was being a “good manager” by planning an “orderly transition.”
Nonsense. “Orderly transitions” must yield to the rule of law—even if that requires waiting to be fired by Trump.
Some commentators are trying to lionize Wray’s capitulation, claiming that the timing of Wray’s resignation forces Trump to obtain Senate confirmation for Kash Patel—something that Trump would have been forced to do if he fired Wray on January 20, 2025.
If Christopher Wray had held the high ground, Trump would fired him on January 20, 2025—Inauguration Day. The firing of Wray on Trump's first day in office would have lived as a day of infamy. Instead, it will be known as “Monday.”
I respect Christopher Wray, but he has missed the moment. He could have stood as a sentinel of democracy, an inspiration to millions of Americans serving as the first line of defense against Trump's ongoing assault on the rule of law. Instead, Wray will be remembered as a “good manager” who made sure all the paperwork was tidied up before he left the field of battle.
Like Merrick Garland, Wray’s announcement made clear that he was concerned, first and foremost, for the department he served. The Constitution came second, and the American people were last.
We are living through a moment of opportunity and crisis. We should do everything we can to prepare, resist, impede, preserve, and defend as appropriate. Surrendering in advance is nowhere on that list.
I am hearing from readers who are concerned about the lack of a coordinated defense against Trump's efforts to run rough-shod over the Constitution. I share that concern. We need a leader who is willing to lead the resistance. We are ready to follow. Someone in the Democratic Party needs to rise to the moment.
Until a national leader emerges to unite the Democratic Party, it is again up to us—the grassroots movement that arose in the hours and days after Trump's victory in 2016. We must lead the way without asking for permission or direction. We must be bold. We must be unyielding. We must not be deterred by appeals to “orderly transitions” and arguments that “that’s the way we have always done things.” It is that attitude of passivity and political conformity that has burdened us with milquetoast leaders like Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland.
Appeasement is the shortest path to surrender. Never surrender!
North Carolina Republicans limit the power of the Governor and Attorney General
North Carolina Republicans overrode Governor Roy Cooper's veto of a bill that transfers control over the state elections board to the Republican state auditor, thereby eliminating the governor’s oversight of the state election board. North Carolina alone awards that power to the state auditor. See Talking Points Memo, With House Veto Override Vote, North Carolina Republicans’ Power Grab Is Complete.
In addition to transferring power over the state elections board to the Republican state auditor, the bill reduces the period for counting and curing ballots. Per TPM,
the legislation compresses the timeframe for the counting of provisional ballots into a three-day time period, instead of a ten-day window. It also compresses how long voters have to cure ballots, as well as the timeframe administrators have to count absentee ballots.
The bill also prohibits the newly elected Democratic Attorney General, Jeff Jackson, from refusing to support legislation that he believes is unconstitutional.
The power grab comes in the waning days of the GOP’s super majority in the North Carolina legislature and is a cynical effort to undermine the democratic outcome of the 2024 election in North Carolina. The effort is particularly shameful because the provisions were embedded in an emergency relief bill for victims of flooding during recent hurricanes.
It requires a profound level of depravity to contest an election, lose, and then use your legislative majority to strip your opponent of the power of office for which he ran and won! It is an insult to the people of North Carolina to say, “You may have wanted Josh Stein as your governor, but we don’t care. We will hobble and undermine his power because we can.”
North Carolina State Board of Elections rejects challenge to 60,000 votes in Supreme Court election
As noted yesterday, Alison Riggs was elected to a seat on the North Carolina state supreme court. Her opponent refused to concede and demanded three re-counts, all of which he lost. He then challenged the eligibility of 60,000 voters based on alleged technical deficiencies in their registrations.
On Wednesday, the state board of elections rejected the challenge to the 60,000 ballots. For now, it appears that Alison Riggs is the winner of the seat on the state supreme court.
The GOP candidate can (and probably will) appeal the decision to a state trial court—which could lead to a ruling by the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Republicans in North Carolina have refined the practice of contesting election outcomes to a dark art. In doing so, Republican legislators have set themselves above the people as the final authority in the state. That is wrong and a mistake that will eventually come back to haunt the North Carolina Republicans. It may take a long time, but the wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine.
Read Jess Piper’s prescription for a national rural economic policy
One of the most interesting voices on Substack is Jess Piper, who writes The View from Rural Missouri. She writes from the viewpoint of a female activist in a red state who won’t take “No” for answer in her efforts to claim democracy for everyone in rural America.
On Wednesday, Jess wrote about the need for a national rural economic policy. Sounds like a boring topic, right? Wrong! In Jess’s hands, the essay traverses topics from the challenges that women face on social media (with death threats second only to rape threats) to rejoinders to the usual “liberal” criticisms of rural conservatives.
As Jess notes, not everyone in rural America is conservative, so the claims that rural Americans “vote against their self-interest” or “get what they vote for” aren’t true for a significant portion of the rural population.
Jess provides a genuine, thoughtful insight in to how Democrats can improve their outreach to rural America. Her essay is worth reading (on many levels): See Jess Piper, The View from Rural Missouri, Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You. I guarantee that you will learn something worthwhile.
Concluding Thoughts
Add to the general capitulation to Donald Trump the weaselly surrender of Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, who just donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund. The collective collapse of billionaires, Senators, major newspapers, and leading media commentators is stunning and dispiriting.
As in 2016, the resistance will rise from the bottom up. It’s you and me—and millions of other Americans who are not afraid, who are not calculating the impact of incurring Trump's wrath on their pocketbooks, and who are not worried that their invitations to power-broker parties in DC will evaporate.
So, for the moment, we are on our own. Frankly, I would much rather have my fate tied to millions of Americans in the grassroots movement than to billionaires and ego-driven politicians worried about their next election or their exit strategy for landing a job on K Street in D.C.
Never surrender.
Yours in solidarity,
Robert Hubbell
Daily Dose of Perspective
Cloud cover has returned to the LA basin, and I have run out of new astrophotography images. Below is a photo I captured on a trip to Alaska in 2023. I took this photo through an airplane window shortly after take-off from Sea-Tac Airport. The image captures a ship plowing through the frigid waters of the Puget Sound.
It is amazing how a little distance can change our perspective and allow us to see patterns hidden when we are at the center of action.
Many readers are claiming that Wray's resignation was designed to force Trump to put Patel through the confirmation process, citing David French's article in the Times. I addressed that fallacy in the newsletter, as explained in my response to William Titelman:
Hi, William. The Vacancies Act would operate in the same fashion regardless of whether Wray resigns or is fired. So there is no strategic advantage in resigning now.
I addressed this point explicitly in the column last night, although I did not mention French by name. I wrote:
"Some commentators are trying to lionize Wray’s capitulation, claiming that the timing of Wray’s resignation forces Trump to obtain Senate confirmation for Kash Patel—something that Trump would have been forced to do if he fired Wray on January 20, 2025."
After further research, I note that some legal commentators contend that Wray could LIMIT Trump's ability to make an appointment under the Federal Vacancies Act by forcing Trump to fire him. See Lawfare, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/how-trump-will-lawfully-appoint-loyalists-without-senate-consent
Perhaps you are being too quick to judge Wray see the opinion piece by David French in today’s NYTIMES and which I am pasting in here:
By David French
Opinion Columnist
On Wednesday, Christopher Wray told his F.B.I. colleagues that he would step down as director by the end of President Biden’s term. His statement was a perfect example of bureaucratic deference. “I’ve decided the right thing for the bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current administration in January and then step down,” Wray said. He wants to “avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”
But is something else going on?
By stepping down now, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a “legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.”
Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation.
Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s chosen successor at the F.B.I., meets neither of these criteria. He’s not in a Senate-confirmed position, and he’s not been a senior federal employee in the Department of Justice in the last year. That means he can’t walk into the job on Day 1. Trump will have to select someone else to lead the F.B.I. immediately, or the position will default to the “first assistant to the office.”
In this case, that means the position would default to Paul Abbate, who has been the deputy director of the F.B.I. since 2021, unless Trump chooses someone else, and that “someone else” cannot be Patel, at least not right away.
The bottom line is that the Senate has to do its job. Wray is foreclosing a presidential appointment under the Vacancies Reform Act, and — as I wrote in a column last month — the Supreme Court has most likely foreclosed the use of a recess appointment to bypass the Senate.
So a resignation that at first blush looks like a capitulation (why didn’t he wait to be fired?) is actually an act of defiance. It narrows Trump’s options, and it places the Senate at center stage. In Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the advice and consent power was designed to be “an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the president, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters.”
Patel is just such an “unfit character,” and now it’s senators’ responsibility to protect the American republic from his malign influence — if, that is, they have the courage to do their jobs.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).