President Donald Trump has fired FBI Director James Comey, in a truly shocking move that throws the independence and future of the top law enforcement institutions of the United States of America into serious question.

The administration is saying publicly that Comey was fired because he mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails last year — and indeed, he has come under harsh criticism for his conduct in that politically charged case from both Republicans and Democrats, though for rather different reasons.

Yet this doesn’t fit with the fact that back in January, Trump had asked Comey to stay on in his post.

And what looms over the dismissal now is the fact that Comey just announced in March that he has been overseeing an investigation into whether the Trump campaign and Trump’s associates coordinated with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

In fact, the New York Times’ Matthew Rosenberg and Matt Apuzzo report that just days before Comey was fired, he “asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.”

Comey’s firing means that Trump will be able to appoint a new FBI director to replace him, and therefore to run the Russia investigation — an investigation that the president has repeatedly dismissed and complained about — so long as that nominee is confirmed by Senate Republicans.

This prospect greatly alarms those who have sought a full investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, and raises obvious comparisons to President Richard Nixon’s attempts to cut off investigations into the Watergate scandal by firing top Justice Department officials. The reactions in Congress and at top law enforcement agencies in the coming days will do much to determine whether any such independent investigation will take place.

Though the president does have full legal authority to fire the FBI director, by custom this is only done under extraordinary circumstances. President Bill Clinton fired FBI Director William Sessions in 1993 due to alleged financial misdeeds, which is the only precedent in recent decades. The post is meant to be nonpartisan; the director serves a 10-year term. Comey was in the middle of his fourth year and stated earlier this year that he intended to serve the full 10.

All of which is to say that this is very much not normal. It is one of President Trump’s most serious violations of American political norms yet.

1) What, exactly, happened here?

Before James Comey was at the center of a controversy around Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 election, he was a Justice Department prosecutor in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations. He first rose to public notice while deputy attorney general during George W. Bush’s first term. When Comey’s boss was hospitalized and he was temporarily running the Justice Department, he refused to reauthorize the administration’s warrantless surveillance program, because he believed it to be unlawful in its current form. Once this story became public, Comey won bipartisan plaudits and a reputation for speaking truth to power, which helped drive President Obama’s decision to appoint him to head the FBI in 2013, even though he was a Republican.

But things took a turn for Comey in 2016, when the FBI took on the politically charged task of investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for her work at the State Department. In July of that year, Comey announced that while Clinton’s actions with regard to classified information were “extremely careless,” he wouldn’t recommend charges be brought against her. Republicans complained that he let her off the hook, while Democrats complained that he so publicly criticized her despite the lack of charges.

Then in late October, Comey courted even more controversy by writing a letter to Congress saying that he’d discovered new Clinton emails that could be relevant — a letter FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has argued "probably cost Clinton the election." (The late email discovery turned out to have no significant new information, as Comey clarified in another letter the weekend before Election Day.)

Once Trump had won, there was some question about whether he’d keep Comey on. But during his first week in office this January, the New York Times reported that Comey had in fact been asked to stay on in his post by the president and had agreed to do so. In early March, Comey said he planned to serve out the full remainder of his term. “You’re stuck with me for another 6 and a half years,” he said.

Later that month, however, Comey gave White House officials an unpleasant surprise. In congressional testimony, he confirmed that the FBI was “investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts” to influence the 2016 election.

By April, Trump’s tone on Comey changed. Asked in an interview on the Fox Business Network whether it was a mistake to keep Comey on and whether it was “too late” to ask him to step down, Trump answered: “No, it’s not too late, but, you know, I have confidence in him. We’ll see what happens. You know, it’s going to be interesting.”

And then, in a surprise move Tuesday afternoon, Trump fired him.

The White House released brief letters from Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and a longer letter from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, laying out the administration’s stated rationale — a rationale that echoed criticisms Democrats made of Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Yet Politico’s Josh Dawsey reports that, per his sources, this decision came from the president, not the Justice Department. For more than a week, Dawsey writes, Trump “weighed firing” Comey because, according to two advisers, “he had grown enraged by the Russia investigation.” He continues:

[Trump] repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said...



...[A White House] spokesman said Trump did not ask for the [Justice Department] letters in advance, and that White House officials had no idea they were coming. But several other people familiar with the events said Trump had talked about the firing for over a week, and the letters were written to give him rationale to fire Comey.

As for Comey, the New York Times’s Michael Schmidt reports that he got the news while addressing FBI employees in Los Angeles — because someone saw a television flashing the news. “In response, Mr. Comey laughed, saying he thought it was a fairly funny prank,” Schmidt writes.

Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe will now step in as acting FBI director. McCabe, it should be noted, is a career FBI official not thought to be particularly close to Trump or Republicans — indeed, his wife recently ran for office in Virginia as a Democrat, though the FBI said McCabe played no role in the campaign. (She lost.)

2) What’s the stated justification for Comey’s firing?

According to Rosenstein’s lengthy letter, he recommended that Comey be dismissed because he had violated Justice Department protocol and investigatory norms in the Clinton email investigation.

Trump has long complained that Comey was too easy on Clinton (and indeed did so on Twitter as recently as last week). Rosenstein is essentially making the opposite argument.

First, he argues, Comey’s surprise public announcement that he would recommend no charges be brought against Clinton in the email investigation “was wrong,” because “it is not the function of the [FBI] director to make such an announcement.” The FBI is supposed to investigate, and the Justice Department is supposed to decide whether to bring charges, Rosenstein explains. Instead, Comey “announced his own conclusions about the nation's most sensitive criminal investigation, without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders,” he writes.

Second, Rosenstein criticizes Comey for publicly castigating Clinton’s conduct (he called her behavior “extremely careless”) even though no charges ended up being brought. Comey "laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial," Rosenstein writes. "It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do."

And third, Rosenstein takes issue with Comey’s defense of his controversial October letter telling Congress that the FBI had discovered new Clinton emails. Comey said that he had to choose whether to “speak” about or “conceal” the investigation, but Rosenstein argues: "When federal agents and prosecutors quietly open a criminal investigation, we are not concealing anything; we are simply following the longstanding policy that we refrain from publicizing non-public information."

If this critique were made in a vacuum, Democrats would surely be nodding their heads — indeed, many of them have made strikingly similar criticisms of Comey’s behavior for months, arguing that Comey’s decision to send the letter in October may have put Trump in office. (And in fact, earlier Tuesday Comey had to correct false testimony about the late email discovery that he had given to Congress.)

But it’s completely out of step with everything Trump and Sessions, Rosenstein’s boss, have said about Comey and Clinton since the campaign. Trump has repeatedly complained that Comey was too soft on Clinton, and in fact cheered his late letter to Congress. “It took guts for Director Comey to make the move that he made,” Trump said in late October. “It took a lot of guts.”

Meanwhile, after Comey sent the October letter, Sessions said that he had “an absolute duty, in my opinion, 11 days or not, to come forward with the new information that he has.” Sessions also defended Comey’s July statements on Clinton, arguing that Obama’s Justice Department had put Comey in a position so that he “had” to speak out himself.

Finally, the timing doesn’t seem to line up. We haven’t learned much of significance about Comey and Clinton’s emails since Trump asked Comey to stay on in his post in back in January.

3) What could be the real justification?

One thing that has changed since January is that Comey revealed the FBI is investigating whether Trump’s campaign or associates colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. (He did so during congressional testimony in March.) When a president fires the FBI director looking into him and his associates, questions will naturally arise about a cover-up.

President Trump has repeatedly denounced the Russia story as “fake news.” He was reportedly very angry when Attorney General Sessions recused himself from any investigations into the 2016 elections in early March. And on Monday night, less than 24 hours before firing Comey, he seemed to call investigation of or hearings on the topic a “taxpayer funded charade,” and asked when it would “end.”

The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017

In the president’s letter in which he fired Comey, he included one line apparently meant to insulate himself from accusations of a cover-up: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.”

But according to a new report by CNN’s Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz, and Pamela Brown, the FBI’s Russia investigation was not a “hoax.” In fact, it was heating up, with grand jury subpoenas being issued to associates of fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in recent weeks. “Investigators have been looking into possible wrongdoing in how Flynn handled disclosures about payments from clients tied to foreign governments including Russia and Turkey,” the CNN reporters write.

And the New York Times’ Matthew Rosenberg and Matt Apuzzo report that just days before Comey was fired, he asked the Justice Department “for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to three officials with knowledge of his request.”

Of course, this isn’t necessarily about Russia. Matt Yglesias argues that while the president’s justification for the firing is laughable and his behavior suggests he is trying to cover up something, it might not have anything to do with Russia at all. Alternatively, the Washington Post has reported that Trump felt Comey wasn’t sufficiently investigating the leaks from law enforcement and intelligence agencies that have dogged his administration.

But Dawsey’s reporting at Politico seems to suggest it was in fact Trump’s anger over media coverage of the Russia story that drove his decision, and that the Justice Department letters truly were written at the White House’s behest to provide a pretext for the firing.

4) What will be the political fallout for the Trump presidency?

When President Nixon attempted to squelch the investigation into Watergate by firing Justice Department officials, it led to bipartisan backlash. A new special prosecutor was appointed who seriously pursued the matter, a congressional investigation moved forward, and it all ended with Nixon’s decision to resign to avoid seemed like certain impeachment.

But the political system has changed a great deal in 40 years, and whether serious investigations into Trump will continue depends in large part on how congressional Republicans react.

Democrats — even those deeply critical of how Comey handled the Clinton email case — have reacted with horror to his firing, since he was clearly independent of Trump. They responded to the news by calling on the Justice Department to appoint an independent special prosecutor to investigate Russia-related matters.

There are two ways a special prosecutor could be appointed — through the Justice Department (which means through Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, since Sessions recused himself), and through Congress.

Before his involvement in this affair, Rosenstein had a reputation as a nonpartisan straight shooter, and had garnered praise from both parties. He’s not publicly known to be a Trump crony. So it might not be out of the question that Rosenstein would choose to appoint a special prosecutor. (Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer claims Rosenstein committed that he would do so if needed.)

As for Congress, Republicans control the House of Representatives and the Senate, and for the most part they have appeared willing and eager to try to defend Trump and shield him from potentially damaging investigations. Several Senate Republicans did criticize Trump’s firing of Comey Tuesday night, however, and the party could come under increased pressure to create a special bipartisan committee investigating either Comey’s ouster or the Russia scandal in general.

His dismissal further confuses an already difficult investigation by the Committee. — Richard Burr (@SenatorBurr) May 9, 2017

Finally, by firing Comey, Trump has opened yet another front in his war with the so-called “deep state.” His administration has been plagued by damaging anonymous leaks from intelligence and law enforcement agencies already. By ousting Comey and throwing the independence of the FBI and Justice Department into question, he has given many more employees potential motivation to leak further.

Those leaks can have serious consequences. When Woodward and Bernstein investigated Watergate, their famous source was dubbed Deep Throat — and, we should recall, he turned out to be a high-ranking FBI official.