President Trump reportedly intends on refashioning his Cabinet should he win reelection.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper are among those who may not continue in the administration, according to a report from Axios less than two weeks before Election Day. Though the list of officials Trump intends to replace reportedly includes others, they are among those he intends to replace first.
“We have no personnel announcements at this time, nor would it be appropriate to speculate about changes after the election or in a second term,” White House spokesman Judd Deere told the Washington Examiner in response to the report.
On Sunday, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that there “will be accountability” on those in the “swamp” who he said are fighting against the president’s agenda.
“I can tell you, it is troubling. When you’re fighting against the swamp, and the swamp continues to fight back with a lack of transparency, that’s very troubling,” Meadows said. “There will be accountability. This president is going to make sure that he holds his administration very accountable so that they’re transparent for the American people.”
A series of actions, or lack thereof, taken by Wray leading up to the general election upset Trump, including not opening an investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business practices and ties, which was widely reported on before the final presidential debate. Trump reportedly grew frustrated with Wray for not removing more bureau officials related to the Russia investigation and for testifying in September that the FBI had not seen evidence of widespread voter fraud.
A senior FBI official told Axios that “major law enforcement associations representing current and former FBI agents as well as police and sheriff’s departments across the country have consistently expressed their full support of Director Wray’s leadership of the Bureau.”
Sources also told Axios that Trump’s confidantes in the West Wing have grown increasingly distrustful of Haspel.
“The view of Haspel in the West Wing is that she still sees her job as manipulating people and outcomes, the way she must have when she was working assets in the field,” said a source with knowledge of the conversations on the potential administration shake-up. “It’s bred a lot of suspicion of her motives.”
Haspel’s opposition to declassifying documents to assist U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia inquiry has also reportedly frustrated the president.
“Since the beginning of DNI’s push to declassify documents, and how strongly she feels about protecting sources connected to those materials, there have been rumblings around the agency that the director plans to depart the CIA regardless of who wins the election,” a CIA source told Axios about Haspel in a second-term Trump administration.
“Director Haspel continues to proudly serve at CIA, and we’ll leave the election season speculation to others,” a CIA spokesperson told CBS News.
Earlier this month, the president said he was “not happy” with the operations of the Justice Department, declining to comment on whether he’d ask Attorney General William Barr to continue leading the department in his second term, saying, “I have no comment. Can’t comment on that. It’s too early. I’m not happy with all of the evidence I have. I can tell you that. I’m not happy.”
Trump’s response came after a Justice Department investigation led by U.S. Attorney John Bash, who resigned from the department in early October, found no “substantive” wrongdoing into “unmasking” requests by Obama administration officials. The findings “fell short of what Trump and others might have hoped,” according to the Washington Post. The scope of Bash’s findings is unknown because the conclusions of the investigation have not been made public.
