Trump dismissal of Comey shows our nation is in peril

We need an independent investigator.

I feel as if we are being conditioned to chaos by a “president” who abhors the stillness of stability. Every day we awake to a new outrage. We now exist in a rolling trauma — exhausting and unrelenting.

Yet even in that context, some things spike higher than others. Donald Trump’s firing of the FBI director, James Comey, is one of those things. This should shock the whole of America out of its numbness.

This is outrageous and without precedent, unless of course we count (as many have) the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre” in which President Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the burglary that would bring Nixon down.

Cox was just a special prosecutor; Comey was head of the FBI.

In his termination letter to Comey, dated May 9, Trump writes that he concurs with “the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

That judgment came in two letters, one from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and another from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, both dated May 9, the same day as the termination letter.

How exactly does Sessions, a person who is a proven liar about his own dealings with the Russians — and who has recused himself from matters dealing with the Trump campaign — make a recommendation to a president whose associates are being investigated for their ties to Russia? And the recommendation is to fire the man leading those investigations?

The sheer brazenness of it all is stunning.

It is in Rosenstein’s letter where things cross over from the outrageous to the absurd. Rosenstein writes: “I cannot defend the Director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken.”

I actually agree with this, but here’s the problem: The president’s own public comments contradict this statement. During the campaign, Trump effusively praised Comey’s outrageous handling of the Clinton email non-issue.

So to pretend now that Trump is outraged by Comey’s mistreatment of Clinton simply boggles the mind.

Then there is this little nugget from The New York Times:

“Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former FBI director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to four congressional officials, including Sen. Richard J. Durbin.”

That appeal was made to Rosenstein.

And then the day after Comey was fired, Trump met at the White House with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador, the same ambassador whom Sessions had lied about meeting and who apparently met with other people associated with the Trump campaign.

It’s all just too much. We need an independent investigator. I don’t trust anything — anything! — coming out of this White House, and I don’t trust this feckless Congress to constrain Trump.

This is not about partisanship, but patriotism. We must protect this country from moral corrosion, at best, and actual destruction, at worst.

If this doesn’t stink to you, your nose is broken.