Has ex-FBI chief Comey fired the starting gun on Trump’s downfall?
FORMER FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY’S SENATE HEARING WAS THE STUFF OF TV POLITICAL DRAMA AND FURTHER RAMPED UP TENSIONS BETWEEN THE US INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AND WHITE HOUSE. WAS IT THE MOMENT THAT MIGHT ULTIMATELY LEAD TO DONALD TRUMP’S DEMISE?
IT wasn’t an episode of House of
Cards or West Wing but you could have been forgiven for thinking it was. Instead this was real-time political drama, its central characters no less intriguing and its narrative just as compelling as any hit television series.
Watched by nearly 20 million viewers for more than two hours on Thursday, a calm and candid James Comey – often referred to as the quintessential “boy scout” – held court in front of 13 US senators and dozens of cameras.
For hours beforehand hundreds of congressional staffers and interns had queued in the hallways of the Senate’s Hart building hoping for a seat to the hottest ticket in Washington.
All were there to witness former FBI director Comey’s testimony first hand before the Senate Intelligence Committee over the scandal of President Donald Trump’s alleged ties with Russia.
In the room there were echoes of other famous US scandals past, Watergate, Iran-contra, Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky.
Once again this was history in the making and the stakes could not have been be higher. After all, Comey himself had been fired as FBI director by Trump, a move many believe was inextricably linked to the bureau’s investigation into the Moscow connection.
So just what would James Comey say? What would this mean for President Trump? These were the key questions on people’s minds as the hearing got under way.
In the event Comey’s testimony was to prove damning for the president. As the hours passed his explosive account asserted that Trump and his administration lied to smear the reputation of Comey and the FBI following his dismissal.
It’s unprecedented for a top American intelligence or law enforcement official to publicly call out the president as a barefaced liar, but that’s what happened.
Not for the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last during the Senate proceedings, sharp intakes of breath could be heard around the room.
There were more, as Comey told of how he documented every meeting he had with Trump because he thought the president might lie about what had taken place.
Yet more still, when he recounted how he passed details of the meetings – via a friend – to the press in the hope of activating the appointment of a special counsel.
To the fascination of everyone in the room, Comey made it clear too that Trump directed him to shut down the FBI’s investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s links to Russia.
In all it was a bravura performance from Comey, one in which he offered a stark view of some of what lies beneath the surface concerning the “massive” Russian interference in the US election.
“There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts,” Comey calmly asserted.
The US media and many watching were impressed, not least by Comey’s more colourful flourishes, like when he compared giving information to reporters as being akin to “feeding seagulls at the beach”.
There were other compelling moments too. Looking straight into the cameras no doubt conscious of the fact that Trump him- self would be watching, it was as if at times Comey was talking directly to the president.
“I’ve seen the tweet about tapes,” he said in one flourish, referring to a Twitter post in which Trump suggested that he had recorded his interactions with Comey. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”
Asked by senator Angus King about what he assumed when Trump said to “hold back”on Flynn and whether he took this as a directive from the president, Comey’s reply saw him quoting Henry II of England.
“Yes. Yes, it rings in my ear as kind of, ‘Will no-one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ ”
One after another, newsworthy quotes like these had the dozens of assembled reporters seated at tables tapping away furiously on their phones and laptops.
The Washington Post called Comey’s testimony a “performance of a lifetime – Classic G-man and aggrieved victim”. And a
New York Times headline billed Comey as, “Hero, Villain and Shakespearean Character”.
However, as one FBI insider pointed out recently in a Vanity Fair magazine article about the bureau’s current travails with Trump, Thursday’s hearing is only one of many inquiries under way into links between the White House and Russia.
RIGHT now there is also a cyber investigation about Russian hacking and whether crimes were committed. And then there’s questions about the business side of President Trump and questions over money from Russian plutocrats that has allegedly been laundered through the president’s real estate empire.
In all, this entire acrimonious and damaging process has thrown into sharp focus what many see as President Trump’s all out war not only with the FBI, but also the wider US intelligence community. This, say some law enforcement observers, has now become a two-way process.
“Trump essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” an anonymous FBI official told the Washington Post last month.
“I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.”
While inevitably some within the FBI were not Comey’s biggest fans, the bureau is known to be something of a close-knit community.
Very early reports from inside the FBI indicated real concern and anger after the dismissal of Comey.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, American filmmaker Marc Levin who spent much of 2016 shooting a documentary series In
side the FBI says he got to know Comey and a variety of FBI staff well.
“Look, Comey made mistakes, but he was popular with the majority of people he worked with at the FBI,” Levin says.
“He was a tremendous motivator and a booster of the institution, so there’s a lot of pain,” added Levin.
Agents themselves in their remarks seem to echo Levin’s observations.
“Everyone feels like there has been a death in the family,” was how one summed it up, while the interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe told Congress last month that, “the vast majority of employees enjoyed a deep, positive connection to Director Comey.”
Given such anger, just what can the FBI actually do in practical terms, if it decides to hit back, to undermine and weaken the Trump presidency?
FBI watchers say to some extent that process is already evident and under way. To begin with the bureau could leak damaging information to the press. They point to the fact that one of the most famous leakers in US political history, the pseudonymous Deep Throat, who gave sensitive information on the Nixon administration to the
Washington Post in 1972-3 during the Watergate scandal, was later revealed to be Mark Felt, who was associate FBI director at the time.
Not everyone of course is comfortable with the idea that the Trump presidency could be toppled by leaks from the FBI or intelligence services. Talk of a so-called “deep state” operating within the US is common among Trump supporters but has been dismissed by others. Where there is little doubt about, though, is that America’s intelligence and military complex is – as ever – alive, powerful and has the capacity not just to make mischief but seriously undermine the Trump administration.
Leaks aside, another way the FBI might work towards this end is by collaborating more closely with Congress to strengthen the legislative probes into Russia. As the numerous inquiries under way have shown, the bureau could intensify its own Russia investigation, or even open new investigations into Trump and his allies.
“The FBI is a tribal organisation,” Ben Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told the American news and opinion website VOX recently. “You screw with the FBI, you screw with the institution of the FBI, and a lot of people are gonna be angry.”
The FBI of course is not the only US law enforcement and intelligence institution that Trump is at loggerheads with – since winning the election last November, he has repeatedly condemned the wider US intelligence community, accusing them of handing “fake news” to the media.
The intelligence services’ assertion that the Kremlin has sought to influence the 2016 election, was dismissed by Trump as coming from the same people who said,
wrongly, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Such is Trump’s antipathy toward the country’s 17 intelligence services that at one point he even found himself likening its personnel to the Nazis. Not surprisingly this soured relations even further and was something that earned Trump a rebuke from Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan.
“What I do find outrageous is equating an intelligence community with Nazi Germany,” he said. “I do take great umbrage at that, and there is no basis for it.”
Leon Panetta, who served as both Defence Secretary and CIA Director, perhaps most succinctly summed up the mood among many in the intelligence community.
“He’s got to have some lines here, he’s got to have some guardrails. The President of the United States cannot just do or say or speak whatever the hell he wants,” Panetta said.
For his part Trump is doing what he can to build a bulwark against his adversaries in the FBI and CIA.
On Wednesday he surprised Washington by tweeting that he intended to nominate Christopher Wray to replace James Comey.
In Wray, Trump has tapped a veteran of the war on terror and a star of the Republican legal establishment.
While Trump has called Wray “an impeccably qualified individual”, the Senate gatekeepers for Wray’s confirmation remain cautious over his selection.
With congressional Democrats questioning whether the FBI can maintain its inde- pendence from the White House, Wray’s background is sure to come under exacting scrutiny in coming weeks.
“Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere Jared Kushner is of particular interest to FBI investigators, and will likely make Wray’s confirmation one of the most contentious in the bureau’s history,” observed Elias Groll, a staff writer at the influential Foreign Policy magazine.
FOR the moment, Trump’s war with the FBI and intelligence community, far from going away, seems only to have intensified following Comey’s testimony.
On Friday Trump broke a twoday Twitter silence to attack the former FBI chief as a leaker and claim “total and complete vindication” despite Comey’s “many false statements and lies”.
Trump’s legal team also confirmed that it was preparing to file a complaint against Comey for sharing his memos with the
New York Times. For many Americans, though, the dramatic events at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing offered signs that all is not lost in Trump’s political America.
“Comey’s testimony may come to be seen not only as a dagger aimed at a morally corrupt White House but also as a powerful drug administered to a very sick patient – ourselves,” says James Traub, a fellow at the Centre for International Cooperation.
“It may be that some of the millions of people who watched James Comey’s testimony were reminded of something they used to believe and even hold dear. If so, he will have rendered an inestimable service,” concluded Traub.
“President Trump badly misunderstood the makeup of Jim Comey,” said Chris Swecker, a former assistant FBI director who once worked with Comey, speaking last week.
“Was it wise to take on the intelligence community the way Trump did? I think he knows the answer to that now.”
President Trump badly misunderstood the makeup of Jim Comey. Was it wise to take on the intelligence community the way Trump did? I think he knows the answer to that now?