The Curious Case for Firing Comey

Tuesday at the White House began with an almost unusual stillness, with President Trump having no public appearances on his schedule. Trump met with aides, received his daily intelligence briefing, and tweeted a series of criticisms of his former acting attorney general. A normal morning, really.

But by the end of the day, the embattled former national security advisor Michael Flynn's business associates had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. White House aides were being deployed all over primetime cable news once again to dismiss allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. The president was revealed to have hired a private law firm to respond to an inquiry by a Republican senator about any possible business dealings between Trump's company and Russian interests. Oh, and the federal law enforcement officer charged with investigating all of it? He ended his day out of a job.

What first broke up Tuesday's quiet proceedings was late-afternoon news that President Trump, on the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, had fired FBI director James Comey, effective immediately. The official reason the administration offered came from a memo signed by Rosenstein, who said Comey's decision to deliver a public statement back in July recommending against prosecuting former secretary of state Hillary Clinton was inappropriate.

"The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General's authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement," wrote Rosenstein.

It's a curious, even dubious reason. Comey's appearance in July was marked by his statement that Clinton was "extremely careless" in handling sensitive government material through her private email server. Comey laid out plenty of evidence for Clinton's carelessness, which ended up proving politically damaging to the Democratic presidential candidate. And Trump, then a candidate himself, criticized the Comey recommendationby saying the "system is rigged" and "very, very unfair" and that Comey exhibited "bad judgment."