OPINION:
President Trump erred in tweeting that agitation over James Comey’s firing will soon turn to gratitude. It already had, before Mr. Trump tweeted this:
“Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me!”
True. Powerful supporters of Mr. Trump’s presidential aspirations disdained Mr. Comey even before President Obama made him FBI director. These people who knew him and his operating methods regarded him as a missile sleekly shorn of principles and unerringly guided by nonpartisan opportunism.
Americans understandably think it verges on the unpatriotic to criticize their venerated criminal investigative agency, but the fact is that under Mr. Comey, the FBI’s failures go way beyond the Clinton private-server/no-punishment scandal. What Mr. Comey somehow escaped major condemnation for were revelations that his agency knew beforehand but failed to stop many of the terrorist who struck the homeland in the past eight years — a subject worth expending a few spare moments of exploration on the Internet, which will lead you to agree that Mr. Comey’s successor had better be a far better manager, since our lives will depend on it. The Comey regime needed draining like the rest of the swamp.
News of the Comey firing was a hammer to the Democrats’ knees, jerking them them into pounding desks and hurling “Watergate” spitballs.
Never mind that most Americans weren’t yet born – and most members of Congress were in kindergarten — when 45 years ago President Nixon got his solicitor general (ok, can you name him?) to fire a special prosecutor (know his name?) for investigating a cover-up (name the crime).
Mr. Comey’s getting the boot left the Democrats tickled pink (good word choice, no?) because it came in the middle of the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation. With their usual sledgehammer subtlety, Democrats hinted that Mr. Comey was about to discover the smoking collusion between Mr. Trump and what critics said was his old bud, Vladimir Putin (the same Vlad in whose eyes President George W. Bush was able to get a sense of “soul”).
In politics as in comedy, timing often is everything. So the question of why Mr. Trump didn’t send Mr. Comey packing on Jan. 20 is a gift to generations pursuing doctorates in political science (yes, it’s still called “science”).
In his “get lost, pal” dismissal letter to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump cited the director’s bad judgment in handling the investigation into the Clinton mishandling of classified emails.
That was back on July 5 of last year, when Mr. Comey went rogue on FBI protocol by saying publicly that Mrs. Clinton did wrong but shouldn’t be indicted for it.
Making that recommendation was none of his business. That’s up to the attorney general of the United States, who happens to be the FBI director’s boss, and who is now Jeff Sessions, who on the recommendation of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in turn recommend to Mr. Trump that he fire Mr. Comey.
The whole Comey spotlight-seeking, Clinton-is-guilty-but-not-punishable thing reeked of self-promotion and kaleidoscopic partisanship (Democrat, twist, Republican, twist, Demo—.)
Mr. Comey was a bad actor throughout his tenure – no getting around it.
“Comey had it coming” may not rank with “Remember the Maine” in the history of American rhetoric but it could be up there.
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