Fire away
Barack Obama should have fired James Comey, but it's pretty obvious why he didn't. Whatever anyone wants to say about President Obama, he is not stupid, and he understands American politics; firing Comey would have looked like an act of political retribution and would have given the Republicans one more thing to beat him over the head with in a final two months better spent doing what he could to tie down his legacy against the barbarians soon to be coming through the gates. Better to let it ride.
Donald Trump isn't not stupid and he doesn't understand American politics (regardless of his surprising success in getting to the top of the system; he obviously understands how to rouse a mob, but now that he's in office, he's proven himself the very Platonic ideal of the proverbial post turtle). Trump decided yesterday evening to stick his arm into the wood chipper, and (being not smart and not understanding how things work) is apparently surprised that things look a lot like the ending of Fargo this morning.
There's plenty of good and not-good commentary out there today. The thing I wanted to shine a light on as briefly as I can is simply that this isn't the end of the world; indeed, Trump, being the least capable man to ever clumsily stumble into the nation's highest office, has done pretty much the worst thing he could possibly do to kill the ongoing investigation into his administration's Russia connections. It creates the obvious impression of a cover-up, but even if it's not a cover-up, the best take you could get out of it is that the Administration is completely incapable of minimally functioning, much less keeping a clean shop, and that the need for a special prosecutor has only increased.
We might remind ourselves that there are a number of theories for what's going on with Trump, his Administration, and the Russians; recently the Lawfare blog set out a continuum of seven not-necessarily-exclusive theories ranging from "it's all a lot of embarrassing coincidences" to "the President's a mole" (the quotes are my paraphrases, not necessarily the authors' exact wording). Almost all of these involve some question of what the President knew and when he knew it--the old Watergate question that bedevils historians to this day. (It might be worth noting, since we mention it, that there are plausible-if-unlikely theories to the effect that Nixon may have been brought down by rogues within his White House who were acting outside his awareness and without his authority--an irony, if true, since Nixon was up to his ears in impeachable offenses that didn't bring down his Administration.) All Trump has done in firing Comey is to draw attention to that question.
It's also worth pointing out that while Comey received the Steele Dossier directly from John McCain (Vox has a pretty good timeline, here) Comey's "leading" of the Russia investigation almost certainly didn't involve the Director of the FBI hunting down leads and devoting a wall of his office to mugshots and surveillance photos connected by color-coded pieces of string. (Do real law enforcement officers even do that, or is this just something they do in movies and television?) I'm sure the agents Comey assigned to the investigation--apparently including a special Washington unit created to focus on the investigation--reported directly to Comey; but it seems unlikely he played that much of a direct role in the direction of their investigation, and their work is presumably going to continue.
And say it doesn't: after all, Trump could appoint a Director to kill the investigation, right? Except this, again, is where we have to remind ourselves of the copious evidence that's already been amassed that Trump has no idea how Washington works. Among other things, Washington D.C. leaks like a sieve and has for more than two hundred years now. Do you know what happens if the Administration tries to lock down the FBI? Let's ask Mark Felt. At this point, if Trump tries to shut the investigation down, D.C. garages are going to be so full of journalists and disgruntled agents, commuters will be looking for parking in Baltimore. (There's a better joke somewhere in there. But it eluded me.)
This is already longer than I intended. I think I have two main ideas here that I'll try to sum up. First, that James Comey was a shit FBI director and the only things saving his job were the horrible political repercussions firing him would bring. And, second, that Donald Trump just fired him. I think that actually sums it up so well, I wish I'd started with that. I may be a poor prophet here, we'll see, but I think there's a very good chance that Trump didn't kill the FBI investigation into his Administration's Russia connections; I think he just gave it a shot of adrenaline and a big old jolt from the paddles. I think the dumb bastard just gave it new life.
There's plenty of good and not-good commentary out there today. The thing I wanted to shine a light on as briefly as I can is simply that this isn't the end of the world; indeed, Trump, being the least capable man to ever clumsily stumble into the nation's highest office, has done pretty much the worst thing he could possibly do to kill the ongoing investigation into his administration's Russia connections. It creates the obvious impression of a cover-up, but even if it's not a cover-up, the best take you could get out of it is that the Administration is completely incapable of minimally functioning, much less keeping a clean shop, and that the need for a special prosecutor has only increased.
We might remind ourselves that there are a number of theories for what's going on with Trump, his Administration, and the Russians; recently the Lawfare blog set out a continuum of seven not-necessarily-exclusive theories ranging from "it's all a lot of embarrassing coincidences" to "the President's a mole" (the quotes are my paraphrases, not necessarily the authors' exact wording). Almost all of these involve some question of what the President knew and when he knew it--the old Watergate question that bedevils historians to this day. (It might be worth noting, since we mention it, that there are plausible-if-unlikely theories to the effect that Nixon may have been brought down by rogues within his White House who were acting outside his awareness and without his authority--an irony, if true, since Nixon was up to his ears in impeachable offenses that didn't bring down his Administration.) All Trump has done in firing Comey is to draw attention to that question.
It's also worth pointing out that while Comey received the Steele Dossier directly from John McCain (Vox has a pretty good timeline, here) Comey's "leading" of the Russia investigation almost certainly didn't involve the Director of the FBI hunting down leads and devoting a wall of his office to mugshots and surveillance photos connected by color-coded pieces of string. (Do real law enforcement officers even do that, or is this just something they do in movies and television?) I'm sure the agents Comey assigned to the investigation--apparently including a special Washington unit created to focus on the investigation--reported directly to Comey; but it seems unlikely he played that much of a direct role in the direction of their investigation, and their work is presumably going to continue.
And say it doesn't: after all, Trump could appoint a Director to kill the investigation, right? Except this, again, is where we have to remind ourselves of the copious evidence that's already been amassed that Trump has no idea how Washington works. Among other things, Washington D.C. leaks like a sieve and has for more than two hundred years now. Do you know what happens if the Administration tries to lock down the FBI? Let's ask Mark Felt. At this point, if Trump tries to shut the investigation down, D.C. garages are going to be so full of journalists and disgruntled agents, commuters will be looking for parking in Baltimore. (There's a better joke somewhere in there. But it eluded me.)
This is already longer than I intended. I think I have two main ideas here that I'll try to sum up. First, that James Comey was a shit FBI director and the only things saving his job were the horrible political repercussions firing him would bring. And, second, that Donald Trump just fired him. I think that actually sums it up so well, I wish I'd started with that. I may be a poor prophet here, we'll see, but I think there's a very good chance that Trump didn't kill the FBI investigation into his Administration's Russia connections; I think he just gave it a shot of adrenaline and a big old jolt from the paddles. I think the dumb bastard just gave it new life.
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