Comey Sought to Expand Russia Inquiry
The cloud hanging over the White House just got bigger and darker.
- Last week, James B. Comey asked a Justice Department official for more resources for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s election meddling. That official then wrote the memo used to justify his firing.
- On Wednesday, the Senate Committee investigating Russia demanded the records of Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser.
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| Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general |
WASHINGTON POST
Senior officials at the White House were caught off guard by the intense and immediate blowback to the president’s stunning decision to fire James Comey. They reportedly expected Republicans to back him up and thought Democrats wouldn’t complain loudly because they have been critical of Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Indeed, that was the dubious excuse given publicly for his ouster.
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To put it mildly, the optics of firing Comey are terrible. Trump looks like he does not actually want to get to the bottom of Russia’s interference in the U.S. election and the potential wrongdoing of his own staffers.
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Trump doesn’t grasp it yet, but firing Comey will only lead to more, and louder, questions about Russia, as well as what exactly Trump knew about Flynn and when he knew it. Sometimes it turns out that the simplest explanation is the correct one. Is it possible that the president kept his national security adviser in the White House for 18 days after he’d been warned by the acting attorney general that he had been “compromised” and was vulnerable to “blackmail” by Russia because he had authorized the conversations in question?
David Ignatius... writes in a must-read column. “...In a book called ‘Spy the Lie,’ a group of former intelligence officers explain the behavioral and linguistic cues that indicate when someone is being deceptive. Interestingly, many of these are evident in Trump’s responses to questions about Russia’s covert involvement in U.S. politics. The authors’ list of tip-offs includes ‘going into attack mode,’ ‘inappropriate questions,’ ‘inconsistent statements,’ ‘selective memory’ and the use of ‘qualifiers,’ such as ‘frankly,’ ‘honestly’ and ‘truthfully.’ The authors’ point is that people who are innocent answer questions simply and directly.”
Our Justice Department beat reporters relay that Comey’s removal has also sparked fears inside the FBI that the Russia investigation might be upended. Trump, after all, will get to handpick the new supervisor of a probe into possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. “The investigation is still in its infancy, but the probe’s sensitive subject matter has already created a political quagmire for the Justice Department,” Ellen Nakashima and Matt Zapotosky report. “A number of current and former officials said that the FBI special agents and National Security Division attorneys who are conducting the Russia probe will continue the investigation. The probe, though, might slow down in the short term. Comey’s successor will undeniably play a major role. ‘No big-time decisions will be made until they appoint a new FBI director,’ said one former federal prosecutor. ‘It’s just a big thing. The FBI will make a recommendation to the Justice Department as to whether or not to go forward, and you’re going to want an FBI director to make that kind of decision, I would think.’ Inside the bureau, agents said that there was shock at the news of Comey’s dismissal and hope that it would not disrupt the Russia investigation.”
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Columnist Charles Krauthammer: “To fire him summarily with no warning in the middle of May because of something that happened in July is almost inexplicable.”
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| President Trump with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, left, and the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, at the White House on Wednesday.Russian Foreign Ministry |
The timing is terrible for the White House in another way: A day after firing the FBI director overseeing the Russia probe, Trump has just one event on his public schedule today: An Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey I Kislyak. “The sit-down between Trump and Lavrov, the first face-to-face contact the president has had with a senior official of the Russian government, will take place at 10:30 a.m. in the White House,” Philip Rucker and Karen DeYoung report. “It will be closed to the press. … Trump and Lavrov are … picking up on the conversation Trump had with Russian President Vladimir Putin via telephone on May 2. … Trump is expected to hold his first meeting with Putin in July, when both travel to Germany to a summit of the Group of 20 leading and developing world economies.” Every one of these meetings will now look more suspect.
Mr. Kislyak has figured prominently in the furor surrounding the Trump team’s contacts with Moscow. It was conversations between the ambassador and Michael T. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, that ultimately led to Mr. Flynn’s ouster in February, ostensibly because he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about whether the two had discussed United States sanctions on Russia
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Keep in mind: The classless way Trump axed Comey might contribute to a desire among some allies and supporters of the ex-director to leak additional damaging information about the president.
....Whoever Trump nominates as Comey’s replacement will face a brutal confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It will get saturation-level media coverage.
-- In the short-term, firing Comey will give fresh and significant momentum to Democratic calls for a special prosecutor: Democrats say they won't support a new FBI director unless a special prosecutor is appointed to investigate Trump's ties to Russia.
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, addressed the Senate on Wednesday morning, largely sticking to the Republican party line and saying that partisan calls for a new investigation should not delay the “considerable work” already being conducted.
Unless Congress passed legislation, which seems unlikely, [above] Rosenstein (who wrote the letter to justify Comey’s termination) would need to decide to appoint a special counsel. But the calls from the left are about to become deafening, and Rosenstein might bow to pressure to save the diminishing credibility of the Justice Department. The special counsel would operate with greater day-to-day independence from Mr. Rosenstein’s supervision, but could still be overruled or fired by him.
[Congress could create a special commission, like the 9/11 Commission, or a special select committee, like the Select Committee on Benghazi, that would replace or supplement the current congressional inquiries. A special commission would require new legislation, which ultimately would have to be signed by President Trump.(Thus it is not likely to happen.-Esco)
A special prosecutor or an independent counsel, like Kenneth W. Starr, who investigated a range of scandals during the Clinton administration, is not an option because the law that created that type of prosecutor expired in 1999.]
“Rosenstein has one chance to rehabilitate his reputation: He can name a special prosecutor to continue the probe. If he doesn’t, the wave of rebellion against Trump so far will become a tsunami, and it will swamp Trump’s protectors in the polls,” Dana Milbank writes in his column. “This president may think himself unassailable, but Americans are seeing him for what he is: a tin-pot tyrant.”
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The House committee’s efforts have stalled after the recusal of its chairman and partisan feuding over the focus of the investigation.
The Senate committee is seen as having more legitimacy and being less marred by partisanship than its House counterpart, but that has not stopped lawmakers from calling for a new special congressional inquiry into the matter.
Justice officials interviewing for ‘interim’ F.B.I. leader
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein were expected to interview at least four candidates on Wednesday to be “interim” F.B.I. director, a Justice Department official said. The person selected for that role would hold it until Mr. Trump’s eventual nominee for the position is confirmed by the Senate.
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-- The media coverage is brutal. Here are takes from five prominent voices:
“It’s a grotesque abuse of power by the president of the United States,” longtime New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN. “This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies, that when there is an investigation that reaches near the president of the United States or the leader of a non-democracy, they fire the people who are in charge of the investigation.” Toobin went on to say that “if anyone thinks that a new FBI director is going to come in and the agency will just take over and continue their investigation as if this had never happened, that’s not how it works. They will put in a stooge who will shut down this investigation.” He specifically mentioned Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani.
Ruth Marcus: “Comey’s firing should make all of us ‘mildly nauseous.’”
The New Yorker’s John Cassidy writes that Trump’s firing of Comey “AN ATTACK ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.”
The Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian (and former editor-in-chief of Newsweek):
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Going forward
The committee has invited Mr. Comey to testify in a hearing on Tuesday. In the end, the committee is expected to produce unclassified and classified reports on its findings.
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| A great summary of the events of the last two days can be found here at New York magazine |
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