Comey’s Termination

As you no doubt have heard President Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey yesterday. The Washington Post reports:

President Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey on Tuesday, at the recommendation of senior Justice Department officials who said he had treated Hillary Clinton unfairly and in doing so damaged the credibility of the FBI and the Justice Department.

The startling development comes as Comey was leading a counterintelligence investigation to determine whether associates of Trump may have coordinated with Russia to interfere with the U.S. presidential election last year. It wasn’t immediately clear how Comey’s ouster will affect the Russia probe, but Democrats said they were concerned that his ouster could derail the investigation.

Early reactions serve mostly as a barometer of the views of their authors on Trump’s election and presidency. The editors of the New York Times declaim:

By firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey, late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump has cast grave doubt on the viability of any further investigation into what could be one of the biggest political scandals in the country’s history.

The explanation for this shocking move — that Mr. Comey’s bungling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server violated longstanding Justice Department policy and profoundly damaged public trust in the agency — is impossible to take at face value. Certainly Mr. Comey deserves all the criticism heaped upon him for his repeated missteps in that case, but just as certainly, that’s not the reason Mr. Trump fired him.

while the editors of the Wall Street Journal intone:

The FBI isn’t supposed even to confirm or deny ongoing investigations, but in July 2016 Mr. Comey publicly exonerated Mrs. Clinton in the probe of her private email server on his own legal judgment and political afflatus. That should have been the AG’s responsibility, and Loretta Lynch had never recused herself.

“It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement,” Mr. Rosenstein wrote. “The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a conflict. But the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department.”

Mr. Rosenstein added that at his July 5 press appearance Mr. Comey “laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”

Then, 11 days before the election, Mr. Comey told Congress he had reopened the inquiry. His public appearances since have become a self-exoneration tour to defend his job and political standing, not least to Democrats who blame a “Comey effect” for Mrs. Clinton’s defeat. Last week Mr. Comey dropped more innuendo about the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia in testimony to Congress, while also exaggerating the new evidence that led his agents to reopen the Clinton file.

For all of these reasons and more, we advised Mr. Trump to sack Mr. Comey immediately upon taking office. The President will now pay a larger political price for waiting, as critics question the timing of his action amid the FBI’s probe of his campaign’s alleged Russia ties. Democrats are already portraying Mr. Comey as a liberal martyr, though last October they accused him of partisan betrayal.

The view closest to my own is expressed in this article at Reason:

In the short term, though, this looks very, very bad for Trump.

The three-paragraph letter announcing Comey’s firing reads like the world’s worst “the dog ate my homework” note and is hard to take seriously. Trump blames Comey’s firing on, of all things, Comey’s handling of Hilary Clinton’s classified emails last summer and makes a lame, backhanded attempt at clearing his own name (“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation…,” Trump wrote). It would be laughable if the matter were not so serious.

[…]

We don’t know whether Comey’s firing is a shrewd political calculation designed to cover-up something Trump doesn’t want the world to know—”Nixonian” has been the word of evening on cable news—or whether it was the impulsive decision of a president who appears to lack much concern for the prestige of the office he holds or for the limits of its powers.

On the question of whether Trump broke laws or whether Comey’s firing was part of a cover-up, Trump deserves to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. The same principle does not apply to the political ramifications of Tuesday’s firing.

Trump should lose any benefit of the doubt that he’s been getting from members of Congress and the general public.

All that I can add is that I believe that throughout this whole sorry mess Director Comey’s actions have been motivated primarily by a desire to protect the FBI’s reputation and his own. He rather clearly failed at both of those objectives.

The American people deserve complete, impartial, and de-politicized investigations of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, the hacking of the DNC’s email, and any connections of Donald Trump or his subordinates with Russia. As of this writing it does not appear that we will get any of those.