FBI chief’s firing flunks the smell test
Reality star’s encore: Meeting with Russian officials
You’d think a former reality TV star would be more aware of optics. But on a day when the specter of Watergate was once again being raised in Washington, when Nixonian was the adjective of choice, and the talk was of a “Tuesday Night Massacre,” there in the Oval Office sat Henry Kissinger, like some ghost of political scandals past.
But that was the second presidential photo-op of the day. Nixon’s former secretary of state immediately followed a visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Yes, the day after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, whose ongoing Russia investigation had become a festering wound for the Trump administration, the president has a sit-down with representatives of the foreign government whose interference in the 2016 presidential election remains undisputed.
Maybe that was intended as a big middle-finger to Comey. But it’s also a big middle-finger to anyone who has concern for the rule of law — which is in grave danger of getting lost in the chaos of an administration run amok.
And what was the rationale for the hasty firing of the FBI director — only the second such firing in the 109-year history of the agency (the only previous one for clear ethical breaches)?
“He was not doing a good job,” Trump insisted yesterday.
The skimpy paper trail offered up Tuesday by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would have us believe Comey’s “misdeeds” were entirely centered on Hillary Clinton’s emails. So the American people are asked to believe that he was fired on a May evening — when he was actually in Los Angeles — because of his conduct more than six months earlier. Not a whiff about the Russia investigation except in Trump’s aside in his official letter firing Comey noting, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”
It truly stretched the bounds of weirdness — and once again introduced facts not in evidence.
You don’t have to be a fan of James Comey to realize that none of this — not the timing, not the logistics, not the haste and surely not the rationale advanced — meets the smell test.
Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted yesterday that Trump was “considering letting Director Comey go since the day he was elected.”
Which further begs the question, why now?
Possible answers to that emerged from every nook and cranny in Washington yesterday.
• Federal prosecutors issued grand jury subpoenas for business records from associates of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, CNN reported. Yes, that would be the same Michael Flynn fired for lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador and failing to register his acceptance of money from Russian and Turkish sources.
• The Trump administration wanted the FBI to prioritize an investigation of leaks — like the one that ultimately cost Flynn his job — over Russian interference in the election, according to other reports. Comey apparently wouldn’t.
• Comey had recently requested more funds from the Justice Department to pursue the Russia inquiry, according to three officials interviewed by the Associated Press. Justice denies that.
Those were the leaks just on day one following the firing. This is a firestorm that won’t be dying out any time soon. And despite Sanders’ insistence that the “rank and file of the FBI lost confidence in the director,” there seems to be no evidence to back that up — which means there are still good and decent people within the FBI continuing to do their jobs until someone tells them not to.
Should that day come it’s likely those leaks will turn into a torrent.
But since Trump has grown so fond of things Nixonian, perhaps he should spend some time reading the Articles of Impeachment drawn up against Nixon, especially this one that charged him with:
“... interfering or endeavouring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees.”
Even Henry Kissinger could tell him, it’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up that’ll get you every time.