The firing of FBI director James Comey was a long time coming, to hear the insiders of the Trump administration tell it. But the final actions that put it in motion took place over the course of slightly more than 24 hours—light speed by government standards, and the hastiness and improvisation showed.
On Monday, May 8, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, arrived at the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump. Trump wanted to know what his two top Justice Department officials thought of Comey and his performance. When Rosenstein, to whom Comey directly reported, told the president of his concerns about the director, Trump told Rosenstein to put down his thoughts in writing. In just one day, Rosenstein put together the memo that would become the White House’s public justification for sacking Comey.
“The current FBI Director is an articulate and persuasive speaker about leadership and the immutable principles of the Department of Justice. He deserves our appreciation for his public service,” Rosenstein wrote. “As you and I have discussed, however, 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.”
Rosenstein’s three-page memo, which has the subject line “Restoring public confidence in the FBI,” leans heavily on the July 5, 2016, public statement from Comey that he would not be recommending prosecution of the case against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In that appearance, Comey said that while there was no “clear evidence” Clinton or her staff had knowingly violated laws about the handling of classified information, the former secretary of state had been “extremely careless.”
According to Rosenstein, this was inappropriate behavior that amounted to usurpation of higher Justice Department authority by the FBI director. The deputy AG noted that several past top DOJ officials from both parties agreed with his assessment—unsurprisingly so, since the FBI’s institutional role is to conduct investigations, the results of which are conveyed to the Department of Justice, whose leaders then decide whether to prosecute or not.
“The way the Director handled the conclusion of the email investigation was wrong,” Rosenstein wrote. “As a result, the FBI is unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a Director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them.” The memo is dated May 9, as is a subsequent letter from Rosenstein’s boss, Attorney General Sessions, to President Trump. “I must recommend that you remove Director James B. Comey, Jr. and identify an experienced and qualified individual to lead the great men and women of the FBI,” Sessions wrote.
That gave the president the justification he needed to pen his own letter to Comey the same day, informing the director he was “hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.” That afternoon, Trump called several leaders in Congress, including House speaker Paul Ryan, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, to inform them of his decision. Trump’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller, now an assistant to the president, set out to deliver the letter in person, before discovering that Comey himself was not at the FBI headquarters in Washington to receive it. The White House was apparently unaware that Comey was visiting agents and employees at a field office in Los Angeles. Comey first heard of his firing from TV reports.
The quick, messy execution of the firing reflected Trump’s ad hoc style, and naturally prompted rampant and ongoing speculation about the timing and seeming urgency of the decision—which came 10 months after the ostensible cause, and while the FBI is in the midst of an investigation that could implicate associates of the Trump campaign.
The subsequent, conflicting arguments from the administration’s spokespeople in the hours and days following the firing added to the sense that the decision must have been made for undisclosed reasons. Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump had been considering letting Comey go “since the day he was elected.” Which is curious, considering that on October 31, just days before he was elected, Trump said Comey had “brought back his reputation” and had done “the right thing” by announcing in an October 28 letter that the FBI had reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. (Clinton herself, and untold numbers of her followers, credits that letter with dooming her campaign.)
Then, in the days after the election, with Democrats still seething about Comey’s 11th-hour surprise, amid speculation that Trump might not want to keep him on as FBI director, the president-elect praised Comey. “I respect him a lot,” Trump told CBS on November 13, adding that he wanted to speak to the director before making a decision about whether to keep him on. Two days after his inauguration, on January 22, Trump blew a kiss and physically embraced Comey at a reception for law enforcement at the White House. “He’s become more famous than me,” Trump joked of Comey.
Except, it seems, as the months wore on, Trump stopped finding it funny. According to several news reports, the president began to compile a long list of reasons for wanting to fire Comey. Among them: Comey’s unwillingness to push more aggressively on investigating executive branch leaks, Comey’s public statement that there was “no information” to back up Trump’s claim the Obama administration had ordered a wiretap on his campaign, and Comey’s insufficient effort, as Trump saw it, to publicly bat down talk that the president and his campaign were being investigated for possible ties to Russia during the election.
Reports from CNN and the Wall Street Journal suggest a more sinister explanation: that Comey and the FBI were ramping up the Russia investigation, seeking additional resources to look at more evidence of possible collusion between Russian agents and Trump campaign associates. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department says reports that Comey had recently asked for more money for such an investigation are “totally false.”
But elsewhere in the investigations of Russian interference, the heat appears to have been turning up. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own investigation, subpoenaed Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn last week, seeking documents related to his business dealings with Russian interests. And a federal grand jury has issued subpoenas for business associates of Flynn.
The New York Times says Comey’s most recent appearance before a congressional panel in early May was the last straw:
Trump reportedly fumed over this latest case of disloyalty during a weekend at his New Jersey golf resort. Back at the White House on Monday, he had decided: It was time for Comey to go. And the Justice Department’s advice, it turned out, didn’t really matter. As Trump told NBC News’s Lester Holt on May 11, “I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.”
Michael Warren is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
