FBI Director Christopher Wray (left), accompanied by his wife Helen Garrison Howell (second from left) and Attorney General Jeff Sessions (right) is sworn in during a ceremony at the FBI building on Sept. 28. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo Trump skips ceremony for FBI director amid Russia investigation

President Donald Trump was conspicuously absent from the installation ceremony of his handpicked new FBI director Thursday because the bureau is involved in the special counsel investigation into whether Trump associates colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, a White House official said.

By avoiding the high-profile event for former Justice Department lawyer Christopher Wray — who assumed the director's post upon being sworn in on Aug. 2 — Trump broke an informal protocol, in which presidents have overseen the largely ceremonial occasion.


An FBI official confirmed that Trump was invited, and that other recent presidents have been invited to, and attended, similar events. A notable exception was George W. Bush, who didn’t attend a ceremony for his FBI chief, Robert Mueller III, in 2001 because there wasn’t one. It was canceled, the White House official said, because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which occurred a week after Mueller started.

White House officials were cognizant of the bad optics of having Trump preside over an event populated by the same law-enforcement agents and prosecutors who were investigating the president’s close associates, and likely Trump himself.

Making things even more potentially awkward was the fact that Trump also fired Wray’s immediate predecessor, James Comey, and then confided in two Russian diplomats that doing so took the pressure off him. That helped pave the way for Mueller, who was Comey’s predecessor as FBI director, to be appointed special counsel to head the Trump-Russia investigation.

For obvious reasons, no one attending was surprised that Comey and Mueller were not present, even though informal FBI protocol has been for former directors to attend.

Mueller, one of the longest-serving FBI directors, is now overseeing many tendrils of the expanding investigation with help from the Justice Department and FBI. One of them is focusing intensively on whether Trump’s firing of Comey last May was part of a pattern of obstruction of justice aimed at derailing the broader investigation.

Comey and Mueller “wanted this to be focused on the FBI, and to have the rank-and-file agents feel confident that the bureau is going in the right direction and that they have good leadership, which they do,” said former FBI Director William Webster, who, still spry at the age of 93, made his way into the outdoor plaza at FBI headquarters for the Thursday event.

Other former FBI directors not present, especially the only one to be fired from the job, William Sessions, “may have been encouraged not to fight old wars” by showing up, said Webster, while another longtime director, Louis Freeh, had business commitments and health problems.

But the exact reason for Trump’s absence was more of a mystery among the hundreds of attendees.

“The assumption is that the president might want to come since he made the selection of the director,” said Webster, chairman of Trump’s Homeland Security Advisory Council and a former federal judge and CIA director. “But there are a lot of other things on his plate, including Puerto Rico.”

Ty Cobb, a White House attorney, suggested there were no hard feelings, saying Trump called Wray on Thursday to congratulate him on the occasion.

Both Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions steered far clear of anything to do with the Trump-Russia probe in their remarks at the ceremony.

In recent months, besides verbally trashing Comey, Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Trump has fired a number of broadsides at FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who served for a time as acting head of the bureau and oversaw the investigation.

In a July 25 tweet — at 6:21 a.m. — Trump inaccurately claimed that “the acting head of the FBI & the person in charge of the Hillary investigation, Andrew McCabe, got $700,000 from H for wife!”

McCabe’s wife, Jill, did get nearly $500,000 in donations for her Virginia State Senate campaign in 2015, but it was from a political action committee of a Clinton ally.

On Thursday, Sessions did make a few remarks that may become relevant if Mueller’s team, and the FBI and Justice Department, ultimately bring criminal charges in connection with the Trump-Russia probe. That appears increasingly likely for at least one Trump associate, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and possibly another, former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Sessions told the assembled crowd that as a former federal prosecutor in Alabama, he was intimately familiar with the hard work, integrity and imperviousness to outside pressure of the FBI agents whose work formed the backbone of his prosecutions.

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“It was the FBI agents and me against a team, often, of aggressive defense attorneys,” Sessions told Wray. “Every investigative move would be attacked and questioned. Time after time, in the crucible of federal trials, the professionalism and integrity of our agents was established before me. That integrity, which engendered confidence in juries, was the foundation for the convictions obtained. Thus, your reputation — the FBI’s reputation — is not a product of image or the media for me. I have seen it proven in real time.”

As the crowd of current and former law enforcement officials milled about after the ceremony, one was overheard saying that Sessions “may have to be reminded” of his support of the FBI, apparently in reference to a scenario in which those agents go after associates of his boss, or the president himself.

Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.

