James Comey is the latest victim of the Clintons
Why did President Donald Trump fire FBI Director James Comey now?
The answer, as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York has argued, is that he waited until after his impeccably apolitical deputy attorney general, Rod
Rosenstein, was in place as Comey's direct superior. Rosenstein was confirmed April 25, and his memorandum titled "Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI" was appended to Trump's firing letter exactly two weeks later.
In that document, Rosenstein characterized Comey's July 5 statement on the FBI's investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's secret email system as "a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do." In support of that proposition, he cited comments from five former deputy attorneys general and four former attorneys general of both major political parties (including Eric Holder, who held both offices).
Who is Rosenstein? He started off as a career Justice Department lawyer and was appointed U.S. attorney for Maryland by George W. Bush in 2005. He was one of only three — out of 93 nationwide — U.S. attorneys kept on during the Obama administration. This could not have happened without the approval of Maryland's Democratic senators, Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin.
Both of them are paragons of integrity with long experience in the swampland of Maryland politics. Mikulski was elected to the Baltimore City Council in 1971 and to Congress in 1976. Cardin was elected to the state Legislature in 1966 and to Congress in 1986. Both saw successive Maryland governors, Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel, ousted from office under criminal charges. Both surely wanted a competent and apolitical federal prosecutor and believed they had one in Rosenstein.
This makes mincemeat of Democrats' cries that Trump fired Comey to kill any investigation of Russian collusion in the presidential election. Rosenstein will be in charge of that, seeing as Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. And Trump's nominee for FBI director will receive close scrutiny from the Senate.
It's similarly far-fetched to compare this to Richard Nixon's firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973. For some Democrats and journalists, every Republican military initiative is Vietnam and every possible scandal Watergate. That's a measure of the nostalgic perspective of the baby-boom generation. We're as many years away from Vietnam and Watergate as they were from the 1920s.
Can something be said in defense of Comey? He was put in a terrible position by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Obama Justice Department. Justice officials downplayed the criminal nature of the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails and granted immunity to Clinton aides rather than summon them before a grand jury. That amounts to weighting the scales of justice in favor of the administration's preferred candidate for president.
So does the June 27 meeting on the Phoenix airport tarmac