President Donald Trump, when asked whether he knew ahead of time about the FBI raid on the home of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, said: “I don’t want to know about it. It’s not necessary. I could know about it. I could be the one starting it, and I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer. But I feel that it’s better this way.”

Immediately, Trump detractors pounced. The Daily Beast wrote, “Trump Wrongly Claims He’s Crime Chief as He Blasts ‘Unpatriotic’ Bolton.” Its political correspondent Farrah Tomazin wrote, “President Donald Trump has bizarrely claimed he is the chief law enforcement officer of America while insisting he knew nothing about the FBI raid on John Bolton’s home.”

The Associated Press wrote, “Trump sees himself as the ‘chief law enforcement officer.’”

This is not the first time Trump made this assertion. In February 2020, The Washington Post wrote, “Post-impeachment, Trump declares himself the ‘chief law enforcement officer’ of America.”

Is it “bizarre” for a president to assert he is the nation’s “chief law enforcement officer” or official?

President Jimmy Carter at a February 1980 White House reception for state attorneys general, district attorneys and police chiefs said: “We have a time of great difficulty in our country. And here in the White House, as President, of course, I have to be primarily concerned about our Nation’s security, about defense, about the maintenance of peace. But that responsibility cannot be separated from my own as the chief law enforcement officer of our country, and the preservation of justice, fairness, equity, the control of crime, the enhancement of respect among every citizen of our Nation for our governmental processes.” Nobody gasped.

President Bill Clinton in November 1998, through his lawyers, answered questions submitted to him by the House Judiciary Committee. This was the first question: “Do you admit or deny that you are the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America?”

Clinton answered: “The President is frequently referred to as the chief law enforcement officer, although nothing in the Constitution specifically designates the president as such. Article II Section 1 of the United States Constitution states that ‘the executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America,’ and the law enforcement function is a component of the executive power.”

On June 17, 1974, Time magazine wrote, “The Law: Is the President Legal Chief”? The piece discussed Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s demand that President Richard Nixon turn over tapes Jaworski deemed relevant to his Watergate investigation. Time wrote: “The President contends that his refusal to hand over the tapes on the ground of Executive privilege transcends the needs of the criminal process. Besides, says White House Counsel James St. Clair, the court should not even consider that question because Nixon is the country’s chief law-enforcement officer, head of the Executive household and ultimately Jaworski’s boss. … Yale’s respected constitutional law professor, Alexander Bickel, supports that argument.”

Time wrote: “Who is right? … The Constitution gives only faint help. Article II, Section 3 prescribes that the President ‘shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ There is no mention of any other law-enforcement officer, including the Attorney General. Thus many experts — including a top Justice Department official — believe that the ‘ultimate’ legal authority belongs to the President.”

One of the “many experts” is the aforementioned Professor Bickel of Yale, who, according to Time, agreed with the “technical correctness of (Nixon’s) argument” and was “convinced that the President is indeed chief law-enforcement officer.” Bickel nevertheless condemned Nixon’s behavior and said it exposed what Bickel called “the fiction of the President as chief law-enforcement officer in the Watergate case.” But, again, as to whether the president is “chief law enforcement officer,” Bickel agreed.

Bickel was not just any law professor. When he died of cancer at the age of 49, a New York Times obituary called him “one of the country’s pre-eminent authorities on the Constitution” and Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger said, “This is a great loss to the law and the country.”

But apparently, Bickel, a “pre-eminent” authority on the Constitution, “bizarrely” considered the president the nation’s “chief law enforcement official.”

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