Serving the public, not The Donald
Over the scant six months of his presidency, I wonder how often Donald J. Trump has asked himself the question: “Why couldn’t I have an FBI Director like J. Edgar Hoover?”
J. Edgar and The Donald — now that would have been a marriage made in hell. Like a couple of knife fighters, Trump and J. Edgar certainly would have understood each other.
Instead, our 45th president and dean emeritus of Trump University got stuck with a 6-foot-8-inch combination of Tom Hanks and Jimmy Stewart.
Comey was such a straight arrow that when Trump yukked it up with those two Russian diplomats in the Oval Office, the day after sacking his FBI director, he couldn’t resist sliming the former prosecutor and career public servant by calling Comey a “nut job.”
At his SRO appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, Comey had too much class to recycle Trump’s slur, but he did make it clear that the president’s myriad reasons for his dismissal “compelled” him to speak his mind.
“The administration chose to defame me and more importantly the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led,” Comey told the bipartisan panel. “Those were lies, plain and simple. And I’m so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and I’m sorry that the American people were told them.”
Asked why he thought he was abruptly fired after Trump initially heaped praise on him, Comey was unequivocal.
“It’s my judgment that I was fired because of the Russia investigation,” he said. “I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavor was to change the way the Russia investigation was being conducted.”
None of the senators, Republican or Democrat, challenged that contention. In the short time Trump has been president, he called or had Comey to the White House nine times, and the really troubling ones were about Mike Flynn and that “Russian cloud.”
As a Nobel laureate once observed, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The tall G-man told the senators he took copious notes of every meeting he had with the president. And for one simple reason:
“I was honestly concerned that he might lie about our meeting,” he said.
Ponder that for a moment: Before a Senate panel and millions watching across the country, the former top cop calmly admitted he did not trust the president of the United States.
Comey went on to admit that after Trump sent out a Twitter threat implying he might have tapes of their meetings, he took it upon himself to make sure his memos went public, by giving them to a friend.
“As a private citizen I felt free to share that,” Comey explained. “I thought it was very important to get it out.”
It wasn’t a leak, just an act of public service.