FBI director Chris Ray's announcement that he'll be stepping down early in his 10-year term and before Donald Trump returns to office in January has sparked debate over how he should have handled his departure.

On that end, the other major news shaping the presidential transition, we turn to the analysis of Brooks and Marcus.

That is New York Times columnist David Brooks and Ruth Marcus,

Associate Editor for the Washington Post. Jonathan Capehart is away. Great to see you both.

Hi. Let's start with Ray's decision. And I want to just play for you a little bit of the comments

that he made to the Bureau on which he announced his decision to step down in January

before Donald Trump could fire him. Take a listen.

In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important in how we do our work.

David, how does leaving early in a 10-year term to avoid the incoming president firing you,

how does that keep the Bureau out of the political fray?

Beats me.

You know, as somebody said Ray had no good options and he happened to choose the wrong one,

the worst of all the options.

And so people have worked hard over decades to make the FBI reasonably non-political.

And that's important because the FBI is this tremendously powerful organization,

which is easily abused, as we saw in the era of J. Edgar Hoover.

And so that we have these 10-year terms, and the idea is that an FBI director does not turn over with the president, because we're building safeguards to depoliticize the agency.

And if Donald Trump wants to ruin that, then he should aggressively have to fire array, and we should have that fight.

And to basically open the door to what Donald Trump wants to do seems to me not the right way to keep our institutions normal.

Ruth, as you probably saw a veteran reporter Jim Fallows, who writes a substack on journalism and democracy, had this to say.

He wrote, eventually Trump would have found a way to fire Ray. Okay, Ray should have made him

do so rather than removing himself. He said Ray has done great damage with this decision and deserves

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