President Donald Trump fired James Comey just as the FBI director moved to expand and intensify the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the possible collusion of Trump advisers in those efforts.
That development alone ought to give pause to Republicans inclined to go to the barricades for the president. But there’s more. The White House’s after-the-fact explanations of the Comey firing were inconsistent and internally contradictory—and even, at times, demonstrably untrue.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump, respectively the man who recommended Comey’s dismissal and the man who executed it, had been on record praising Comey for the very thing they cited as the chief reason for terminating him. Trump, who had been critical of Comey’s refusal to prosecute Hillary Clinton, offered effusive praise when the FBI director announced days before the election that he was reopening the probe. “What he did, he brought back his reputation—he brought it back,” Trump said at a rally. “He’s got to hang tough because a lot of people want him to do the wrong thing. But what he did was the right thing.” The president was still defending Comey’s conduct in an interview last month with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business. Sessions, who on May 9 formally recommended that Trump fire Comey for his conduct, told Fox News in November 2016: “FBI Director Comey did the right thing when he found new evidence. He had no choice but to report” his findings to the American people.
The recommendation from Sessions was not just inconsistent; it was subterfuge. After Comey was fired, the Trump administration sought to portray the dismissal as something Trump acted upon but did not conceive. The White House released the letter Trump sent to Comey, along with letters from Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein laying out the case against Comey. Trump wrote Comey that he had “accepted their recommendation” to fire him. Hours after that letter was made public, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer held an impromptu press availability outside the White House. Spicer answered a few questions, but redirected many others to the Department of Justice because, he said, “they’re the ones that made the recommendation.” The next day, Vice President Mike Pence defended “the president’s decision to accept the recommendation of the deputy attorney general and the attorney general to remove Director Comey.” But this is not, in fact, what happened. As White House sources told The Weekly Standard at the time, and as Trump later made explicit in an interview with NBC News, the president was “going to fire [Comey] regardless of the recommendation.” By Trump’s own telling, he would have fired Comey even if Sessions and Rosenstein had recommended keeping him—a direct contradiction of the White House line of the previous two days.
The pace of the inconsistencies was dizzying. One day before firing Comey, Trump tweeted: “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax. [W]hen will this taxpayer funded charade end?” On Tuesday, shortly after Comey’s termination, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared: “It’s time to move on.” But in the aftermath of copious reporting that Comey’s termination came because of Trump’s frustration with the FBI’s Russia probe—not the Hillary Clinton email investigation—White House officials did another 180. By Thursday Sanders was saying, about Trump’s view of the Russia investigation: “I think he would love nothing more than [for] this investigation to continue to its completion.”
On it went all week—one Trumpian argument after another falling apart. And yet Republican officeholders mostly stuck by their president. Some of them praised Trump. Others avoided comment. Still others focused exclusively—reflexively, predictably—on the (very real) inconsistency of Democrats.
It’s an understandable impulse. The Democrats, after all, are being monumentally hypocritical—from last summer until this week, they had been calling for Comey’s head, blaming his handling of the email investigation for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. There are cogent arguments, as well, that Comey deserved to be fired long ago. And there are legitimate questions about the FBI’s Russia investigation; the Trump administration is not wrong to be concerned about the many leaks related to these matters.
There is, too, a laudable inclination to want President Trump to succeed. He is the president, and the country will be better off if he’s a successful one.
We understand these arguments. We’ve made some of them. But there are times, when the stakes are high, that self-respecting officeholders need to lead, even if it’s politically risky, rather than circle the wagons.
One who did last week was Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.). He expressed his unease, fittingly, in a series of tweets on May 10:
He’s right. It’s worth noting that Gallagher is a freshman member of the House, 33 years old. Where are the senior statesmen among congressional Republicans?
