Donald Trump just fired James Comey as director of the FBI. The justification offered for this decision might as well have been written by Hillary Clinton, and it's not difficult to imagine a President Clinton-appointed Attorney General offering precisely the same rationale for recommending Comey's dismissal. You should read the attached letters, especially the memo from Deputy AG Rosenstein--they're fascinating if only for how brazenly they expect you to accept *Clinton's* narrative on Comey, for how transparently silly an attempted misdirection this is.
I will say, though, that I am quite amused by the idea that Trump actually is as mad at Comey for the way Comey handled the Clinton email investigation as Clinton herself is. Neither Clinton nor Trump wanted Trump to be the 45th president, after all--so the idea of Trump firing Comey for fucking up and paving the way for Trump's own presidency is pretty funny.
But I remain utterly unconvinced by the desperate attempts to blame Comey for Trump's victory last November, no matter how often a grasping, delusional Hillary Clinton wants to lay her failure at his feet. Read this! (https://nyti.ms/2pm9eqY) There are some actual reasons to be highly skeptical of Comey's alleged determining impact on the election, rather than a bunch of obsessive whining that willfully ignores the possibility of a distinction between correlation and causation.
And for all the willingness of Clinton apologists--and now the Trump administration--to run Comey down the plank for his actions in July through November of last year, I'm also not convinced that he did the definitively wrong thing at any point. I don't want to turn this into a point-by-point apology for Comey's decisions over the last nine months, but demonizing him is wildly unfair. (I think that his actions last July were justified by the plainly unacceptable "friendly" meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch, and I also understand the decision to send the late October letter to Congress as a way of protecting the Bureau's reputation in case anything damning came of the Wiener emails--to say nothing of the fact that *nobody* thought Trump was going to win, anyway. I highly recommend this short Times podcast, which offers decent insight into Comey's thinking throughout.
But no matter what you think of Comey, pretending that his dismissal is about his handling of the Clinton email investigation is pretty silly. If you listened to Trump's rhetoric over the last year, you'd sooner expect Trump to want Comey fired for not personally tossing Clinton in jail himself than for mishandling his public commentary on the former candidate. Of course this isn't about that.
This is about Comey and the FBI's investigation into ties between Trump and Trump associates and the Russian government. The Trump administration believes, hopefully wrongly, that they can diminish or derail the investigation by getting rid of the director, and replacing him with someone more friendly to their interests. I suppose they further believe that Republican leadership is too afraid of a Trump-base backlash to finally demand an independent investigation, the pressing necessity of which cannot now be overstated. Or maybe they just believe, like cynical party fuckhead Rand Paul said back in February, that the Republicans won't waste their time investigating fellow Republicans: "I just don't think it's useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We'll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we're spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense."
It shouldn't be that complicated. The President just fired the director of the FBI, who was conducting an investigation into ties between the President and a foreign adversary. No matter where you stand on the question of Trump's ties to Russia, it is now screamingly obvious that an independent investigation is necessary. I would say that one's party affiliation shouldn't matter in this case, but it's actually the opposite--if you're a Republican, and you hope that your party survives Trump, the only chance it has is an honest confrontation of the facts. If there's nothing there, great for you! If there is something there, though, do you really want to be counted among those who tried to hide the truth, when the truth finally outs?
Bill Clinton fired his FBI director in 1993, over concerns about William Sessions' judgment, apparently amid a public airing of dirty internal politics at the FBI. This is not that. This is much closer to Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired Special Investigator Archibald Cox, who was looking into the Watergate break in. The firing of Comey is just as brazen, and maybe even worse--how can the public be expected to trust the independence of the next FBI director, and therefore the whole Bureau, at this point? And if the Republican-controlled Congress fails to establish and fund an independent investigation after all this, what sort of check and balance are they providing, at this point?
The Trump True Believers will never find that Trump has crossed a line that they cannot abide. They are unwilling or unable to see him for what he is--and that's fine, actually, as they are a minority, if a violently dumb and loud one. At some point, the rest of the craven Republicans must decide that Donald Fucking Trump is not the hill the GOP wants to die on, even if it costs them a few votes. If not now, when?
