Most news media and the entire Democratic Party has concluded that President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey was a corrupt effort to quash an investigation into his campaign and administration, and to protect himself politically and legally.
Anything’s possible, but there is scant evidence to support the suspicion so far. The one thing certain about that firing of Comey was that it would produce a firestorm and stoke suspicion about collusion with Russia. So the suggestion it was done to make the investigation go away is implausible on its face.
The Comey firing so far looks more like a replay of Trump’s first travel ban, in January — a controversial but justifiable decision executed incompetently, bolstering opponents’ charges of bad motives.
This has become a tiring and distressing pattern that the Trump administration follows too often.
The president’s handling of Comey’s dismissal isn’t just a matter of bad appearances. He simply sent a letter to FBI headquarters. Comey wasn’t there and saw news of his execution on television monitors while he gave a recruiting lecture across the country. Trump’s letter also included a weird and tasteless self-congratulatory line about himself not being under investigation.
White House aides, in disarray and out of the loop about the firing, went on television Tuesday night and contradicted the reasons given in the letter and accompanying memo. Lawmakers, reporters and FBI employees were all left totally in the dark.
This wasn’t just bad optics or amateur public relations. It was politically improper. The president owes the country and the FBI director a clear consistent explanation. This obligation was obviously greater in relation to Comey because of the active investigation into the extent and nature of Team Trump’s ties to Russia.
A proper process required detailed preparation. Instead, as with the travel executive order, the White House seemed to rush the decision, and keep the process confined to a few insiders.
The result was predictably ugly and gave ammo gratuitously to partisans determined to see evil where it may not exist, and to reverse engineer their analysis of motives accordingly.
“The country has reached an even more perilous moment than what it saw during Watergate,” the New York Times suggested on Twitter Wednesday, with absurd melodrama. “Mr. Comey was fired,” the paper flatly asserted, “because he was leading an active investigation that could bring down a president.” The Times simply does not know that — all the news that’s printed to fit the preconceived narrative.
The Times’ a blunt statement is what most journalists seem to believe and what Democrats want everyone to accept. It may be true, but it’s also far beyond the reach of the facts at hand. Increasingly, the Russia scandal seems to be a Mike Flynn scandal. Trump’s culpability appears at the moment not to have been involved colluding with a foreign power trying to influence our election, but negligence in relying on men like Flynn and Paul Manafort.
Trump can still prove his critics wrong. If he hires a fitting replacement for Comey, he deflates the charge that the firing was about protecting himself. The next FBI director needs to have a proven career as an impartial and serious man or woman of law or law enforcement, as we wrote Tuesday night.
A fiercely independent replacement for Comey — not a partisan such as Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie, who are rumored to be among the contenders — would cast the firing as Trump simply axing a man whom Democrats and Republicans alike said for months had lost the trust of the agency.
But Trump could also prove his critics right. If he picks a political ally, a stooge, or someone not fully independent, he will make his firing of Comey, whatever the intentions, an act of self-protection.
The president should have learned the lesson of his immigration order that process matters. It’s too late for him to repair the process of firing Comey. He still has a chance to determine whether it amounts to a sloppy exercise of legitimate executive authority, or an abuse of power.
