It has happened before: the interim appointment of a man unknown and unqualified, except for his open loyalty to the president, to one of the top law enforcement jobs in the federal government.
It was May 1972 when President Richard Nixon abruptly elevated Patrick Gray III, a Justice Department official as colorless as his name, to the directorship of the FBI following the sudden death of J. Edgar Hoover. The announcement came as a shock. The conventional wisdom, both outside and inside the bureau, was that one of Hoover’s hand-picked executives would run the FBI when he no longer could. The naming of Gray, even on an acting basis, was widely criticized. The president “has chosen a highly political and professionally unqualified crony to direct this powerful and semisecret police agency,” the New York Times editorialized.
There is a parallel between Donald Trump’s selection of Matthew Whitaker to be the acting attorney general, replacing Jeff Sessions, and Nixon’s appointment of Gray. Both appear to be efforts to personalize law enforcement if not justice itself. Yet there are also marked differences between the two situations that make Trump’s brazen selection of Whitaker more disturbing in its implications than Gray’s appointment—and nearly every other maneuver, legal or political, that Nixon tried in his desperate effort to survive the Watergate scandal.
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