For three days, Donald Trump insisted that he fired FBI Director James Comey on the recommendation of Comey’s nominal superiors, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. But that narrative came unraveled late Wednesday night, when The Washington Post revealed that Trump had already decided to dump Comey long before talking with anyone from the Justice Department.
Several White House officials told The Post that Trump had been stewing over Comey for some time. Not only had Comey publicly called BS on Trump’s claims that he’d been wiretapped on orders from then-President Obama, but Trump was angered at Comey’s focus on the Russian effort to hack the election rather than leaks to journalists. According to these officials, Trump’s growing displeasure with Comey was stoked by Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani, among others.
It finally came to a boil last weekend, while he was vacationing at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. When he returned to work on Monday morning, he told several of his closest confidants–including Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon–that he was going to fire Comey.
Before making the final decision, though, he called in Sessions and Rosenstein and ordered them to “explain in writing the case against Comey.” Less than 24 hours after Sessions and Rosenstein finished their work, Comey was speaking to FBI employees in Los Angeles when news flashed on the screen that he’d been fired.
Conventional wisdom suggested that within hours–minutes, even–of The Post’s account of Comey’s ouster going live, there would be a “(noun) (verb) FAKE NEWS!” response from Trump on Twitter. After all, Trump actually banned The Post from his campaign, and the only paper hates more than The Post is The (“Failing”) New York Times. Additionally, Trump’s minions in the White House, from Pence on down, have gone to great lengths to echo Trump’s narrative.
But there were no angry tweets. Instead, we got this interview with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt, in which Trump singlehandedly upended the line he himself had set for three days. Watch a clip here.
Trump said that it was “my decision” to fire Comey regardless of what Sessions and Rosenstein recommended. He called Comey a “showboat” and a “grandstander.”
He also claimed that FBI morale had cratered under Comey’s watch. But according to CNN’s Jim Sciutto, Comey’s firing came as a bolt out of the blue. Watch here.
Deputy director Andrew McCabe, who is now acting director pending a permanent successor to Comey, also knocked this line down in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Watch here.
When Holt pointed out that Trump had specifically stated in his termination letter to Comey that he was acting on the advice of Sessions and Rosenstein, Trump replied, “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.”
Most of the discussion about this interview centers around Trump reiterating a claim he made in the termination letter that Comey had personally told him three times that he was not a target of the investigation. A number of legal experts tell NBC News that this would be grossly improper if true–indeed, it would be a violation of longstanding DOJ rules that forbid discussions of active investigations with the White House. Scuitto’s sources in the FBI claim that Comey would never disclose such information.
But there’s another issue that isn’t being discussed. Did Trump intend to merely use the memos from Sessions and Rosenstein as a pretext to justify a decision that he had already made? If Trump had already intended to fire Comey, why even bother with asking Comey’s nominal superiors for their opinion? And why was Sessions even involved, given that he has recused himself from all matters related to the Russia probe?
These are not idle questions. After all, this is the first known instance of an FBI director being fired when people close to the president are the targets of an active FBI investigation. If Trump used Sessions and Rosenstein as a cover for a decision he’d planned to make long before he got those memos, then Comey’s firing isn’t just a case of Third World-style hackery. It’s potentially impeachable. After all, if the memos were merely intended as a cover, the firing would at the very least meet the real-world definition of obstruction of justice.
While I called for Comey to resign for his egregious lapses in judgment during the campaign, it is downright laughable for Trump to use them as a pretext for firing Comey. After all, he loudly applauded Comey’s unprecedented announcement that he was looking into emails potentially related to Hillary Clinton’s email server. It is clear beyond any doubt that he was fired for pushing too hard on the Russia probe.
And now we have to ask whether an FBI director, regardless of his faults, was fired to throw off an investigation that was getting too close to the president’s aides. If it were indeed true, it would be outrageously criminal regardless of whether we had a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.
For all the bleating and screeting from Trump loyalists that we don’t need a special prosecutor in the Russia affair, the developments of the last 24 hours prove beyond any doubt that we definitely need one. If the American people even have to wonder if a sitting president–regardless of party–fired an FBI director in hopes of derailing an investigation, then we should demand nothing less.
(featured image courtesy Andrew Harrer, pool reporter)
