Tuesday at the White House began with an almost unusual stillness, with President Trump having no public appearances on his schedule. Trump met with aides, received his daily intelligence briefing, and tweeted a series of criticisms of his former acting attorney general. A normal morning, really.
But by the end of the day, the embattled former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s business associates had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. White House aides were being deployed all over primetime cable news once again to dismiss allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. The president was revealed to have hired a private law firm to respond to an inquiry by a Republican senator about any possible business dealings between Trump’s company and Russian interests. Oh, and the federal law enforcement officer charged with investigating all of it? He ended his day out of a job.
What first broke up Tuesday’s quiet proceedings was late-afternoon news that President Trump, on the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, had fired FBI director James Comey, effective immediately. The official reason the administration offered came from a memo signed by Rosenstein, who said Comey’s decision to deliver a public statement back in July recommending against prosecuting former secretary of state Hillary Clinton was inappropriate.
“The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement,” wrote Rosenstein.
It’s a curious, even dubious reason. Comey’s appearance in July was marked by his statement that Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling sensitive government material through her private email server. Comey laid out plenty of evidence for Clinton’s carelessness, which ended up proving politically damaging to the Democratic presidential candidate. And Trump, then a candidate himself, criticized the Comey recommendationby saying the “system is rigged” and “very, very unfair” and that Comey exhibited “bad judgment.”
But he reversed that judgment when Comey, just days before the election, wrote a letter to members of Congress saying that the FBI would be continuing to investigate newly acquired information concerning Clinton’s email server. At the time, Trump hailed Comey for the eleventh-hour bombshell. Sessions, then a U.S. senator and ardent Trump supporter, praised Comey on TV for “doing the right thing.” The letter, released to the public, is credited by some with hurting Clinton in the final stretch of the campaign and helping win the election for Trump.
All of this information was known to Trump when he decided to keep Comey in his job at the beginning of the president’s term—making his decision to fire Comey in May all the more confusing.
Less confusing if the New York Times‘s reporting is to be believed. Here’s Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, a reliable journalist who broke the initial story more than two years ago that Clinton had set up a private email server while working in the Obama administration: “Senior White House and Justice Department officials had been working on building a case against Mr. Comey since at least last week, according to administration officials. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had been charged with coming up with reasons to fire him, the officials said.”
So what’s changed since January—or since last week? In March, Comey had revealed in testimony before the House Intelligence committee that the FBI had an open investigation into whether or not the Trump campaign had colluded with Russian officials or persons. And last week, Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary committee about, among other things, Russian interference in the election.
But if the Russian investigation—Comey’s public statements stating that Russian is still trying to influence American politics through cyberattacks or other means—had to do with Trump’s decision to sack the FBI director six years before Comey’s term expired, the White House isn’t saying. Asked by Tucker Carlson of Fox News if firing Comey is meant to affect the FBI investigation, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied the suggestion. “I don’t think it affects it at all,” she said.
Then, Sanders lit into the idea of investigating Russian involvement at all. “Frankly, it’s kind of getting absurd. There’s nothing there,” she said. “It’s time to move on.”
But Comey’s firing, and the whole host of developments, won’t quell questions or suspicions—making it hard for investigators, members of Congress, and the media to simply “move on.” The story, unfortunately for the Trump White House, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
