Thomas Donlan of Barron’s suggests there’s plenty of blame to go around when discussing the president’s controversial decision to fire FBI Director James Comey.
By his overly public and erratic behavior, Comey helped conflate the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, its concurrent probe of the ways that the Russian government attempted to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, and the strange Russophilia of Trump’s short-term national security advisor, Michael Flynn.
Comey’s FBI has been up to its elbows in presidential politics since 2015, when the bureau let it be known it had opened a criminal probe of classified emails on Hillary Clinton’s home computer server—compounding her inappropriate privatizing of her communications as secretary of state with his inappropriate leak of information about the investigation.
Then the FBI started looking at contacts between the Russian government and members of the Trump campaign—generating inappropriate assumptions about connections to the Clinton emails. …
… Trump weighed in inappropriately several times, cheering on Russian hackers in general and urging the Russian government to publish anything it found. Of course, he condemned Comey’s decision not to prosecute Clinton: “Today is the best evidence ever that we’ve seen that our system is absolutely, totally rigged.” Later, he accused the Obama administration of tapping communications in Trump Tower in New York, an accusation still unencumbered by evidence.
