As of Tuesday morning, James Comey was the malicious or incompetent villain who had stolen the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. His last-minute letter to Congress, effectively reviving the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, either caused or coincided with Clinton’s slide into her historic loss.
Comey had also given misleading information to Congress a few days ago, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that Huma Abedin had forwarded “hundreds and thousands” of Hillary Clinton’s email messages to her husband, Anthony Weiner, when in fact she had sent relatively few. The false claim, which the FBI only clarified Tuesday in a letter, was repeated extensively both in the news media and by senators during other public hearings.
Late last year, top White House aides and Democratic lawmakers alike were calling on President Obama to fire Comey. Then-Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused him of violating the law just days before the election.
“The president can fire him for cause and ought to,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., told CNN, even as the popular vote was still being tallied. “He violated all the guidelines and put his thumb on the scale of an election.” He said it had been “unforgivable for a police agency to opine publicly about legal conduct” when he had briefed reporters in July on his decision not to press charges against Clinton. Nadler said that “to have the police intervene in an election, which is what happened, is unforgivable, a threat to our democracy.”
On Wednesday, when Comey finally was fired by Obama’s successor, and the stated rationale was nearly identical to the one Nadler had offered. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote in a memo to his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, that Comey had greviously erred when he “announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation, without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders” last July 5. He said of the Justice Department, “[W]e do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation. Derogatory information sometimes is disclosed in the course of criminal investigations and prosecutions, but we never release it gratuitously.”
But Comey’s firing by President Trump on May 9 has suddenly rehabilitated him in Democrats’ eyes. They are comparing it to Nixon’s Saturday night massacre, or in the New York Times’ editors’ case, saying it is even “an even more perilous moment,” which is really a bit much. This abrupt reversal is based on the theory that they can tie Comey’s firing to the ongoing FBI investigation of Russian interference in the election to weaken Clinton’s campaign.
For millions of conspiracy-minded voters who view Trump as a plague on American democracy, that investigation represents their last desperate hope. It will, they believe, uncover evidence of direct collusion between Trump and a foreign power to subvert American democracy and somehow result in his removal from office.
The chances of that seem extremely remote. The simplest explanation for the Russians’ motivation does not require any direct involvement by Trump, and in fact such involvement might have made it less effective. Based on intercepted messages that demonstrate Russian interference in the election, we also know that the Putin regime fully expected Hillary Clinton to win right up until the last minute, like everyone else on earth. They viewed their helping hand for Trump as a good way of weakening the anticipated Clinton presidency in whatever way possible. Direct collusion with Trump cannot be ruled out based on this, but it makes it superfluous and an unnecessary risk. And to date, there’s not only no evidence that it occurred, but not even a clear hint of it.
If Trump goes on to appoint a close crony or campaign supporter to replace Comey, he would vindicate all of the Democrats’ fears and make believers of many Republicans as well. Any sign that he’s trying to kill off an investigation of himself could possibly even topple his own presidency. Senate Republicans (at least one would hope) would vote against confirming such a person.
But if he picks a non-controversial replacement — someone with a non-political law enforcement background, who can presumably be counted on to let the investigation go wherever the facts lead — it’s going to be hard to look back on Comey’s firing as anything but a good idea that had enjoyed strong bipartisan support for the better part of a year.
