In a shocking development, Donald Trump has fired FBI Director Comey. No one saw it coming-- apparently it was in the works for about a week between Jeff Sessions and the White House. Many have commented on whether it was appropriate for Sessions (who had recused himself from the Russian investigation) to be involved in the removal of the man actually running the Russian investigation.
In a total weasel move, Trump's letter didn't state his personal reasons for making the decision, but rather shifted the blame to a memo written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (presumably Jeff Sessions was too stupid to write it). Even worse, Trump didn't have the balls to call Comey himself to deliver the news--- Comey found out when the news of his firing came over CNN on a TV in a conference room where he was speaking to FBI employees in the Los Angeles field office. In a move that demonstrated how personal this was for Trump, he had the letter delivered to the FBI building by his personal bodyguard (Keith Schiller) instead of the White House Counsel or Chief of Staff. People are even speculating that the White House had no idea that Comey was on travel status in Los Angeles.
Of course, nobody believes that Trump fired Comey because of how he publicly dealt with the Clinton email invesigation. Trump himself praised Comey during the campaign and said he was 'being brave" in how he handled her case. If Trump did have any issue with Comey over the Clinton email handling, he would have fired him the day after inauguration.
Legal scholars and historians are comparing these events to Nixon's firing of Archibald Cox in 1973. To most of these observers, the Comey firing is a grotesque abuse of power-- and it is now abundantly clear that Trump does not recognize the concept of checks and balances in our democracy. Comey wouldn't explicitly rule out Trump as being under investigation in his Hill testimony last week, and Trump was pissed. Trump's pathetic non-sequitur in his letter (where he squeezed in a mention that Comey allegedly said to him three times he wasn't under investigation) makes that clear. Everyone in the federal government should take note-- displease King Trump and your career will be in jeopardy. This alone may explain why career prosecutor Rod Rosenstein would agree to be complicit in this controversy.
Almost assuredly, there will be monumental pressure for Rosenstein to appoint a special prosecutor on the Russia investigation. There is widespread concern now that they real reason Comey was fired was because the FBI's Russian investigation was getting to close to Trump for comfort. The only way for the American public to have any confidence in our democracy is to have a special prosecutor to uncover the truth of whether Russia was involved in steering the election and whether anyone in the Trump campaign (or even Trump himself) was involved.
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