We begin today's roundup Michiko Kakutani’s NYT book review of James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty”:
Decades before he led the F.B.I.’s investigation into whether members of Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, Comey was a career prosecutor who helped dismantle the Gambino crime family; and he doesn’t hesitate in these pages to draw a direct analogy between the Mafia bosses he helped pack off to prison years ago and the current occupant of the Oval Office. [...]
The central themes that Comey returns to throughout this impassioned book are the toxic consequences of lying; and the corrosive effects of choosing loyalty to an individual over truth and the rule of law. Dishonesty, he writes, was central “to the entire enterprise of organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic,” and so, too, were bullying, peer pressure and groupthink — repellent traits shared by Trump and company, he suggests, and now infecting our culture.
CNN’s Stephen Collinson:
It is nothing less than the most devastating, contemporaneous takedown of a sitting president in modern history.
The James Comey storm, brewing menacingly on the horizon for months, slammed into the White House just after 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, as the first leaks of the fired FBI director's explosive new book started gushing out.
Proving that revenge is a dish best served cold, Comey waited 11 months to exact his retribution for his dismissal by President Donald Trump last May. When it came it was unsparing, richly detailed and mortifying for the President.
Alex Johnson at NBC News:
Few earth-shattering details emerge, but numerous detailed observations fill in some of the blanks of his version of events in the federal investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she was secretary of state and the so-called Steele dossier, the 35-page opposition-research document alleging that Trump's presidential campaign colluded with Russia.
And in case you were wondering, the president's hands are not, in fact, "unusually small," Comey writes.
Paul Waldman dives deep into the Republican attacks on Comey:
To be honest, it's a little disappointing that "Lyin' Comey" was the best they could come up with. We already had "Lyin' Ted" Cruz after all, so it seems rather unoriginal. But in this battle for public opinion, they have to convince people that Comey is lying, or the whole enterprise fails.
Furthermore, there's a purpose underneath the effort to discredit Comey that may not be immediately apparent: They need to provide a justification, or at least some measure of cover, for when the president moves against Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Roger Cohen blasts the president:
We are tethered to a buffoon. He rages and veers, spreading ugliness, like an oil slick smothering everything in its viscous mantle. He’s about to bomb Syria. He’s not about to bomb Syria. His attention span is nonexistent. He attacks the foundations of our Republic: an independent judiciary, a free press, truth itself. His cabinet looks terrorized, the way Saddam Hussein’s once did.
President Donald Trump is dangerous. The main things mitigating the danger are his incompetence and cowardice. We live in a time that teaches how outrage can turn to a shrug, how the unthinkable repeated over and over can induce moral numbness, how a madman’s manic certainties can overwhelm reason. He is very busy; people resist; he opens another front; people shake their heads. It’s hard to remember on Friday what happened on Monday. Trump’s is the unbearable lightness of the charlatan.
Here’s Michael Waldman’s take on the need to protect Mueller at The Daily Beast:
There are signs the political system is creakily moving into gear to protect the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Will the moves be fast enough? The integrity of our democracy might depend on the answer. Congress could act to protect special counsel Robert Muller and make it far harder for a panicked president to fire him. Mueller, too, appears to be taking steps to protect the investigation even if Trump swings the axe. Justice Department leadership could find ways to block or at least delay his firing. Ultimately, though, only a howl of public outrage would be enough to protect the investigation.
On a final note, don’t miss this piece by Norman Eisen and Richard Painter at USA Today rebutting Trump’s apparent reasons for going after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein:
Everything we know about Rosenstein's handling of the special counsel’s investigation suggests that he has acted with integrity. He has clearly defined Mueller’s jurisdiction. When a matter that appeared to be unrelated to that jurisdiction appeared, he referred it to the appropriate U.S. Attorney's office rather than expanding the special counsel’s scope. Far from giving Mueller sprawling Ken Starr-like power to go after whatever potential offenses he comes across, Rosenstein has kept the special counsel focused on Russian interference, potential cooperation between Russia and the Trump campaign, and offenses such as obstruction of justice and financial crimes arising directly from that investigation.
Under these circumstances, if Trump fires Rosenstein, it will clearly be for one reason and one reason alone: to impede the lawful investigation of the president and those close to him. Similar actions by President Nixon in the Saturday Night Massacre led to his downfall. The firing of Rosenstein would have the same outcome for Trump.