Firing Comey: The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

NBC's Lester Holt interviews President
It already seems long ago, with so much happening. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was scripted to "discover" documents proving Obama "wiretapped" Trump Tower during the transition. He was then to run them over to the White House (but stop on the way to tell the press) to alert the president that he had been surveilled. It fell apart when Nunes revealed he had got the documents from none other than White House staff the night before, and it turned comical when Trump blew up the timing planned for his story, telling reporters from Time of the documents before he was supposed to know about them.

It happened again. Supposedly developing on his own the case against FBI Director James Comey since he took office, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein sent a memorandum to the White House so damning that it left the President no choice. It was Comey's improper handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's e-mail last year that did him in. How unfortunate that it hurt her chances of being elected, but that could not be allowed to influence the decision. Trump took immediate and decisive action, firing the director. It of course had nothing to do with the Russia investigation.

Then came reports that Trump had ordered up the report from Rosenstein, and on a rush basis, so that the president could make the firing a Justice Department recommendation. Vice President Pence was sent out to say repeatedly, "President Trump made the right decision at the right time to accept the recommendation of the deputy attorney general", with Spicer stand-in Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying the same.

Then Trump again blew up the cover story. In an interview with NBC's Lester Holt two days after firing Comey, he admitted he had intended to do so for some time, undercutting what he had told Sanders and the vice president to put forth. The contradiction was his staff's fault for their lacking in "accuracy". Rosenstein, too, knew about Trump's prior intention to fire Comey, he would tell senators a week later in a closed session, so another sterling reputation was damaged for playing along with a Trump sham.

Moreover, he undercut his Hillary e-mail fable when he told Holt, "When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story".

The day after firing Comey and the day before the interview was when he met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and their U.S. ambassador Sergey Kislyak. A week later, the Times would report that Trump said to the Russians, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job”. Trump told them, "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off." The quotes were in a document summarizing the meeting that was read to the Times by an American official. Perhaps exhausted by having to create alternate truths only to be undercut by Trump, Sean Spicer did not deny what the Times reported. The media was filled with analyses of what constitutes obstruction of justice.