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There’s no serious argument that this is appropriate behavior from an American president. Imagine for a moment testimony that President Barack Obama or a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton had a similar conversation with an FBI director. The entire conservative-media world would erupt in outrage, and rightly so. The FBI director is a law-enforcement officer, loyal to the Constitution, not the president’s consigliere.
The testimony paints an ugly picture of the president. Trump’s interactions with Comey are excessive and bizarre (to the point of ordering everyone out of the Oval Office before making his request that Comey drop the Flynn investigation). Comey notes that he spoke only twice to President Obama, once when the president called him to say goodbye. By contrast, he had nine private conversations with President Trump in a mere four months. To put this in perspective, the GOP was rightly outraged when Bill Clinton met privately — once — with Loretta Lynch during the Hillary e-mail investigation. Here we have evidence of multiple meetings where the president directly tried to influence the conduct of an FBI investigation. This is far worse and far better-documented misconduct. Overall, one gets the impression that the president views himself less as the president of a constitutional republic and more as the dictatorial CEO of a private company. This is understandable, given his long experience in the private sector, but it’s unsustainable. President Trump has to better understand not just the separation of powers but also the constitutional and legal obligations of governance, or the turmoil surrounding Comey’s termination will be but the first of a series of controversies that could well shake his presidency to its foundation.
