« Reply #2 on: May 18, 2017, 02:52:53 am »
Complete agreement with what DVH wrote here:
Certainly, in the existential political war that Trump finds himself in, it would have been wiser, first, to have rallied his entire White House team and congressional leaders around the decision and established a shared narrative, to have been magnanimous to the departing James Comey, and to have had obtained private guarantees from a preselected successor that he or she would serve and be appointed within a day or two.
But otherwise the firing was overdue.
The head of the FBI (quite outside his purview as an investigatory official) announced in summer 2016 to the nation that he had decided not to seek an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then, again in the role of a presumed federal attorney, he seemed to reverse that judgment by reopening his investigation. Then he appeared to re-reverse that decision — all at the height of a heated presidential campaign. Throughout such a bizarre sequence, Comey stuck to a (flawed) exegesis about the nature of federal statutes in question (intent is not a mitigating circumstance in the felonious insecure transmission of classified federal documents). Comey de facto had assumed yet another new role in addition to his newfound claims to be both an investigator and a prosecuting federal attorney — that of legislator and judge.
Comey's firing for those deeds alone were more than warranted a looooong time ago. But Trump kept him on - and if there is any truth to the rumor that Trump petitioned Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn, Trump pulled the trigger with his Twitter thumbs to the gun he put in his mouth.
Logged
Fart for freedom, fart for liberty and fart proudly. - Benjamin Franklin
...Obsta principiis—Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers and destroyers press upon them so fast that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon [the] American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour." - John Adams, February 6, 1775
