President Donald Trump will reportedly move to “immediately fire” three top U.S. officials if he wins re-election next month and has additional planned replacements after those three are gone.
The three officials who Trump wants to immediately remove include FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, according to Axios. Wray and Haspel are reportedly “despised and distrusted” by the administration, and the president would have already fired both — starting with Wray — if not for politically damaging headlines in the run-up to next month’s elections.
“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,” a source told Axios. “It’s bred a lot of suspicion of her motives.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported last month that Haspel was blocking the release of documents critical to understanding the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016. Multiple sources have told The Daily Wire the same thing.
The news comes as Trump signed a new executive order last week that will make it significantly easier for the administration to remove individuals in the federal service who are “constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies,” Axios added.
“Separating employees who cannot or will not meet required performance standards is important, and it is particularly important with regard to employees in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions,” the executive order said. “High performance by such employees can meaningfully enhance agency operations, while poor performance can significantly hinder them. Senior agency officials report that poor performance by career employees in policy-relevant positions has resulted in long delays and substandard-quality work for important agency projects, such as drafting and issuing regulations.”
CBS News Senior Investigative Correspondent Catherine Herridge reported last month that in addition to the COVID-19 pandemic being a contributing factor in slowing things down, the investigation “expanded in recent weeks” and it now “goes well beyond [the] origins of FBI Russia probe.”
Trump allegedly wants to get rid of Haspel for her opposition to declassifying documents related to the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016. The president allegedly wants to get rid of Wray for a multitude of issues, ranging from his disagreement with things the administration has said, to him not removing more FBI officials tied to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. Trump reportedly soured on Esper after Esper pushed back on the idea of deploying the military to stop the far-left riots over the summer.
The report also noted President Donald Trump’s frustrations with Attorney General William Barr after recent reports indicated that U.S. Attorney John Durham was not going to have a report ready before the election from his criminal investigation into the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016.
This report has been updated to include additional information.