Nuts. There’s just no other word to describe what happened this week with the ouster of FBI director James Comey and the White House’s whipsaw explanation of it, changing from one interview to the next by the hour. Donald Trump and his minions took an action that was inexplicable and lovingly molded it into something indecipherable, which resulted in the media epiphany: This White House is past the point of reasonability.
Somewhere between the White House bushes where Sean Spicer took cover Tuesday night, the Vice President’s Rod Rosenstein hedge Wednesday, and Donald Trump’s bombshell Lester Holt interview Thursday that blew it all apart, Beltway reporters had enough.
The New York Times decided it was time to finally just lay it bare in the lede of a story.
After President Trump accused his predecessor in March of wiretapping him, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, was flabbergasted. The president, Mr. Comey told associates, was “outside the realm of normal,” even “crazy.”
The media moment has echoes of the birther awakening journalists underwent during the campaign after Trump’s aides called a press conference in which the candidate was supposed to issue a mea culpa for his long-running corrosive accusation that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But after a bunch of veterans spent the presser praising Trump, he stepped to the mic and read one sentence, "President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period," while also blaming Hillary Clinton for starting the rumor (another lie).
That week, many journalists, including the New York Times, graduated from offering more delicate framing for Trump’s transgressions, like “unthruths” or “falsehoods,” to simply using the word “lie.” This week, reporters stopped giving White House aides the benefit of the doubt in large part because they conceded a single point: Whatever his diagnosis, Trump is downright crazy. Accordingly, Trump will inevitably make a liar of everyone who works for him, including his Vice President and a fresh face at the podium, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose relative purity he sullied in a mere 24 hours.
The reviews that followed of Trump’s interview with Lester Holt were so scathing, Trump finally decided it was time to just cut the press out altogether.
The question now is, will journalists’ newfound clarity help force some fence-sitting Republicans off their perch?
While House and Senate leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell both predictably toed the party line this week as they always have, journalist Robert Costa reported many Republicans on Capitol Hill were complaining privately that Trump’s actions had boxed them in. They would have to find some way of looking like they are taking the Russia inquiry seriously.
Trump’s demeaning characterization of Comey as a “showboat” even prompted GOP Senate Intelligence chair Richard Burr to call Comey “one of the most ethical, upright, straightforward individuals I've had the opportunity to work with.”
But is it enough? Because what we have here folks is a cover-up: The Comey firing gave unmistakable form to a narrative that’s been shadowing Trump’s administration since Day 1. This handy Venn diagram sums up what we know.
Right. The problem with fired U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is that we don’t know much about his inquiries, only that he was investigating Health Sec. Tom Price and corrupt Russian businessmen. Based on Sally Yates’ testimony Monday (yes, this week!), we now clearly understand her perception of the threat a compromised Michael Flynn posed to our national security, but a “classified” cloak remained around the core of what she knows about Flynn, his conduct, and the circumstances of his firing.
Enter Comey. We have enough supporting information to know exactly why he was axed even if we don’t know all of what he knew. Thanks to Trump’s total incompetence and comically leaky White House, the cover-up his aides attempted this week was more of an unseemly full frontal of team Trump.
Initially the firing was pinned on Comey’s handling of Clinton’s emails and the loss of confidence in him at FBI and didn’t have anything to do with Russia. Then we find out Trump told Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein to write the memo, the FBI rank and file had total confidence in Comey, and Comey’s demise was absolutely about Russia. Beyond Trump admitting he had Russia on the brain in his Holt interview, here’s a Washington Post account pulled from interviews with some 30 Trump administration officials (nothing says loyalty like 30 people selling you out):
Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists.
Comey was getting too focused and too close. Hours before his firing, CNN learned that federal prosecutors had issued grand jury subpoenas to Flynn’s business associates as part of the FBI’s probe into Russian meddling. Comey had also requested assistance from the Justice Department in the Russia investigation.
What Comey said he asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for, the officials said, was more attention, focus and labor hours from Justice Department prosecutors.
Ultimately, a sulking ego-sunken Trump concluded last weekend at his Bedminster resort that Comey wasn’t loyal enough, compliant enough, and dammit, he was soaking up the spotlight with all his Russia talk. Every time Trump turned on the TV, there it was! When he returned to the White House Monday, instead of getting talked down, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein greased the skids for Comey’s ouster, which resulted in the worst week for the White House since the tumultuous Muslim ban roll out.
And that’s where this gets especially interesting. The Muslim ban was Bannon’s baby, and Trump eventually took so much heat for it among other Bannon blunders, that the “West Wing Democrats”—Ivanka and Jared Kushner—leveraged it to orchestrate Bannon’s demotion.
Since then Ivanka and Kushner have been credited for sometimes saving Trump from himself on several occasions. Rightly or not, people hypothesize that they’ve kept Trump from signing the most pernicious form of an anti-LGBTQ “religious freedom” order, for instance. And it was reportedly Ivanka’s upset at Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attack that led us to bomb a Syrian airfield with absolutely no strategic purpose. But for some reason, on this decision—which any rational person knew would open a political minefield—the couple decided to hold their fire.
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom work in the White House — have frequently tried to blunt Trump’s riskier impulses but did not intervene to try to persuade him against firing Comey, according to two senior officials. (emphasis added)
National security journalist Marcy Wheeler has a theory about that. She believes Kushner may have had an even dodgier meeting with Russian operatives than Flynn did—a proposition she teases out in this post. The fact that the first grand jury subpoenas we know of were issued to Flynn associates suggests that Flynn actually isn’t the biggest fish investigators are trying to fry. More likely, he’s a stepping stone on the way to building the foundation for a larger case.
But the Kushner theory aside, what is perhaps most interesting about the decision to go nuclear this week on Comey was the pre-announcement calm inside the White House.
In fact, the Washington Post reports that “there was little apparent dissent over the president’s decision” to ax Comey as several White House officials walked him through how it would work.
Frankly, that is stunning. Trump’s action bore such obvious comparisons to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre/Watergate scandal that undid Richard Nixon, it felt eerily close to watching history repeat itself. Yet no one raised a red flag of caution? The notion that the half dozen administration officials who were privy to the information—particularly Sessions, Ivanka, Kushner, Reince Priebus, and White House counsel Don McGahn—shared a certain oneness of mind defies all reason.
Unless, of course, everyone involved had a dog in this hunt. And notably, none of those people were anywhere to be seen this week as the fallout ensued.
