Deceit and Danger: Comey's Firing Will Not Go Down Well

Illustration by William Rotsaert

When the news broke here in Washington, D.C., I flashed back to the 1973 Nixon/Cox episode, and my initial gut reaction was outrage that once again America was going to be put through an emotional and political wringer. And then I considered the vast difference between the White House of 1973 and the White House of 2017, and put that comparison aside. And you should too.

Despite what the talking heads say, the Nixon White House, skulking under the Watergate clouds of localized lies, deception, and dirty tricks, bears little resemblance to the Trump White House dancing in wild abandon under thunderheads boiling and roiling with openly-celebrated acts of hatred, arrogance, duplicity, derangement, and inhumanity. For all that was wrong with Nixon, his legacy will never fall to the depths of Trump’s.

By pushing back against a legitimate investigation into a matter involving the highest level of national security, Trump is exposing the United States to a foreign enemy who has no compunction about using any American citizen to advance their nefarious plans to undermine our faith and confidence in our democracy.

But my outrage remained. It is an outrage that the nation is about to undergo a transformational era due to the ego of one of the most unprepared, ill-advised, intellectually inept presidents in the long line of Chief Executives. As one of my friends on Facebook said within minutes of the breaking news,

“This is what a coup looks like, happening in real time. Trump must be stopped, and soon, before he destroys this country. Anybody who continues to support or defend him past this point will own every bit of this cataclysmic shitstorm, from here until the ugly end of it. And this goes triple for the craven, opportunistic, amoral Republicans in both houses of Congress. In addition to already glowing in the dark from their votes on the health "care" bill, every one of these assholes will stink like they've been bedding down in a den of skunks, for the duration of their misbegotten careers in the political sphere -- which with any luck will be terminated next year. Because make no mistake about it: even if Trump goes down, they will NOT shake off the stench from having been one of his eager enablers. In the meantime: Resist!”

On the surface (which is all there really is to the Trump White House), the optics of the Comey firing were terrible; timing is everything here in DC, and this firing could not have happened at a more inappropriate or inopportune time.

It had the smell of presidential excrement all over it; it came on the heels of Sally Yate’s and James Clapper’s testimonies which were not Trump-friendly; it happened within 48 hours of Jim Comey’s misstatement/restatement about Huma Abedin’s emails (the first statement helped Trump, the recanted and corrected statement infuriated him); it followed by only a few hours Senator Lindsay Graham’s offhanded comment to CNN’s Manu Raju about possibly subpoenaing Trump’s tax returns; and it came just three hours after White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tried to heave Sally Yates under Trump’s Tour-of-Lies It was that last point—the WH attempt to disparage Sally Yates—that framed my thoughts on Comey’s firing.

For most of the country—the 99.999% who live far beyond the Washington Beltway—this story will have legs only insofar as Trump supporters will raise their glasses or bottles in raucous toasts to their leader (who, unbeknownst to them, is slowly strangling them and throwing them into the Don’tCare healthcare and TaxDeform ditches), and Trump detractors will organize a nationwide March of Outrage, with posters of Jim Comey and Archibald Cox leading the parades.

There will be pockets of Americans who won’t give a damn because life is real and earnest for them as they struggle with

• underwater mortgages,
• choking tuition bills,
• drought,
• floods,
• sick livestock,
• broken cars,
• no transportation,
• potholes in their crumbling small towns,
• not enough police,
• angry police,
• opioid addition,
• the spectre of gangs roaming their poorly-illuminated streets,
• parental/spousal/employer abuse,
• leaking pipelines,
• undrinkable tapwater,
• crumbling bridges over polluted streams,
• images of fistfights on airliners,
• babies with heart problems,
• being a single parent to an at-risk child
• adult children caring for mentally-diminished parents,
• underfunded schools trying to teach underfed students,
• homelessness,
• lack of broadband to connect with the world (maybe that’s a mixed blessing),
• and vote-pandering politicians whose bi-annual promises have yet to fix any of the above.

Those issues, dismissed by most of the policy wonks and news bureaus as not sexy enough to sustain a news cycle, fell by the way completely Tuesday evening. There was an air of snark to the news on every channel, as the White House lawn filled with journalists rushing to read the termination letter and start the finger-pointing process at prime news time on the East Coast.

Here in Washington, House and Senate speechwriters began working overtime to craft statements reflecting partisan annoyance with “my colleagues across the aisle,” and calling for either an independent prosecutor or letting the House and Senate investigating committees continue with their investigative work (whatever that is).

The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson, in one of the best timeline reports of the White House Press Office’s lame attempts to explain the Comey dismissal, focused on the bizarre nighttime ad-hoc press briefing I think I’ve ever seen. It’s worth a long quote from Johnson’s piece to give you a sense of the weirdness of the moment. Several White House spokesperson’s had trotted out to the media area on the North Lawn to talk about whether the president directed Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to conduct a probe of FBI Director James B. Comey. Sensing that the assembled reporters were not buying what Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway were trying to sell, Sean Spicer took matters into his own inept hands and out of his own inarticulate mouth.

After Spicer spent several minutes hidden in the bushes behind these sets, Janet Montesi, an executive assistant in the press office, emerged and told reporters that Spicer would answer some questions, as long as he was not filmed doing so. Spicer then emerged.

“Just turn the lights off. Turn the lights off,” he ordered. “We'll take care of this. ... Can you just turn that light off?”

Spicer got his wish and was soon standing in near darkness between two tall hedges, with more than a dozen reporters closely gathered around him. For 10 minutes, he responded to a flurry of questions, vacillating between light-hearted asides and clear frustration with getting the same questions over and over again.

Spicer said he's not aware of any of Rosenstein's superiors who might have directed him to do this — although he then said that such questions should be directed to Justice officials, not him. Spicer did a lot of referring.

Was Sessions involved? “That's something you should ask the Department of Justice,” Spicer said.

Was Rosenstein's probe part of a larger review of the FBI? “That's, again, a question that you should ask the Department of Justice,” he said.

Did the president discuss Rosenstein's findings with Rosenstein? “No, I don't believe, I don't know how that sequence went — I don't know,” he said.

What was the president's role? “Again, I have to get back to you on the tick-tock,” he said.

When's the last time Trump and Comey spoke? “Uh, I don't know. I don't know. There's some — I don't know. I don't know,” he said.

What were the three occasions on which the president says Comey assured him that he was not under investigation? “I don't — we can follow — I can try, yeah,” he said.

How long did the president deliberate? “I don't, I don't ... I can look at the tick-tock. I know that he was presented with that today. I'm not sure what time,” he said.

Why wasn't Comey given the news in a personal phone call? “I think we delivered it by hand and by email and that was — and I get it, but you asked me a question and that's the answer,” he said.

If that 10-minute bobbling of blustering bombast and “tick-tock” sleight of tongue seems otherworldly, you are in good company.

So, here’s my theory, for what it’s worth:

Trump’s general counsel, Donald McGahn, was confronted by Sally Yates in mid-January over what seemed to Yates to be a potential for Russia’s compromise of Lt. General Mike Flynn, then Trump’s National Security Advisor. Yates, a 27-year veteran of the Justice Department, but appointed to the job of Deputy Attorney General by then-President Obama, probably minced no words about her deep-seated concern that Flynn was a target of Russian compromise.

McGahn reported to Trump, possibly in the company of Steve Bannon and others. Trump, egged on by Bannon (though not much egging was needed), was furious, saying he was not going to tolerate bad and fake news from someone he regarded as disloyal and tied to the previous administration (Yates). “Bring her back in tomorrow, Don,” was Trump’s order. “And find out what she’s got, and make sure we get it.” There is also a side conversation about why someone like Yates or even the Justice Department itself, should judge internal White House conversations.

McGahn calls Yates back down to the White House to get more details, specifically, according to Yate’s testimony, “Why does it matter to Yates's Justice Department if one White House official lies to another?” (She explained it was because Flynn could be blackmailed by the Russians for being caught in a lie that the Russians knew was a lie.) Why it matters is a subject for an entirely new Quora response, but in short, it matters because a liar who will lie to a colleague, will certainly lie to the nation.

Yates returns to the Justice Department and arranges for materials to be made available to McGahn. Yates is then fired for insubordination by refusing to uphold Trump’s travel ban executive order. More than a week passes before the WH collects the investigation materials on Flynn. Meanwhile Flynn sits in on at least on top-level phone call with Vladimir Putin.

Comey, by this time, is caught in the middle of political emotions. On the one hand, Trump has alternately praised and denounced and praised again Comey for the whole 2016-spanning Clinton email kerfuffle. On the other hand, Trump is getting pretty tired of the Comey-led Russian investigation, and the other investigatory drumbeats echoing down Pennsylvania Avenue from both chambers of the Congress. His guy, Comey, is problematic—as far as Trump is concerned, Comey is a short-fused firecracker, capable of going off on his own at any moment. Not good.

Then Comey does just that—but to Trump’s advantage! Comey holds a press conference in which he (mistakenly) alleges that thousands of Huma Abedin’s emails were sent to her husband, Anthony Weiner’s, laptop for printing out, and that there were classified documents therein. Trump is happy. But…Comey then recants, and has to back up and explain that no, there were not thousands of emails, and the classified documents amounted to about a dozen emails not even marked with the appropriate classifications. Shades of the Clinton October surprise whipsawing. Trump is now furious again.

Finally, Yates and former DNI chief Clapper testify before the Senate, and each one lays a solid path of potential Russian compromise leading directly to the White House door, and Comey is mentioned in the testimony. Trump has had enough. He pulls the plug on Comey, but makes sure it is done in such a way as to maximize Comey’s embarrassment. He just manages to have at hand, a hastily written report by his newest Deputy Attorney General that shows that Comey has been doing a bad job all along, and that the Hillary Clinton miasma was sufficient of itself to merit Comey’s dismissal.

Here are the texts of the dismissal letter, and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein's messages to the president.

What I find both fascinating and troubling is the reference Trump makes in his second paragraph in his letter to Comey in which he says Comey told him three times that he (Trump) was not under investigation.

“While I greatly appreciate you informing me on three separate occasions that I am not under investigation…”

If that is true, then Comey broke the law by revealing information about the investigation to a potential target of the investigation, and Trump broke the law by accepting that information and not acting to dismiss Comey immediately for revealing a conclusion about the investigation.

I cannot believe James Comey ever said directly to the president, "You are not under investigation." It simply defies all logic, but it does reflect Donald Trump's inexhaustible desire to promote himself through self-righteously-chosen out-of-context examples.

If there is one area in which Nixon and Trump have some measure of similarity, it is on display right in this moment: Trump makes sure Comey does not see the firing coming, sending his personal bodyguard to deliver the news, and making sure Comey sees the dismissal right along with the rest of America—on television, the ultimate “You’re Fired,” reality show.

What Trump and his Team of Drivels did not plan for, was the explosion of outrage that hit the country. Trump is surprised because he thought the Democrats would hail him for getting rid of Hillary Clinton’s bête noire, and he assumed Republicans would commend him for his decisive action at cleaning house.

Well, it doesn’t work that way here in Washington—no deed, good or otherwise—goes unpunished, Mr. Trump. You will pay a price for this, no matter who you install as the next FBI director, and the nation will be watching.