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Had enough? President Donald Trump had enough of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey last week, for reasons that seemed good enough. But the president had spent the past year praising Comey whenever the director’s actions suited Trump’s political needs and condemning him when he did not deliver what the president wanted. Americans should say they’ve had enough of that.

Trump has gone back and forth on Comey like a tennis ball in a hard-fought match, showing as much self-control and responsibility as the ball.

As with other memorable Washington crises, from Richard Nixon’s Watergate to the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of right-wing groups seeking tax-exempt status during the Obama administration, investigations become ends as well as means. Just as a cover-up can become more important than the offense being covered up, so the preservation and extension of an investigation can become more important than whatever is being investigated.

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.

Enough Is Too Much

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.

Comey stained himself in July 2016 when he held a press conference to announce all the ways that Clinton had been “extremely careless” about handling classified material, including the possibility that hackers had gained access. He didn’t say that the hackers were definitely Russian or that they were definitely successful, but Russian hackers did gain access to the Democratic National Committee’s computer system.

After his recitation of Clinton’s errors, Comey declared that Clinton should not be prosecuted—inappropriately on at least two levels, since it’s the job of a prosecutor and a grand jury to make such decisions, not the investigating agency, and because neither the investigators nor the prosecutors are supposed to discuss such decisions in public.

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.

In October, just before the election, the FBI learned that thousands of emails sent and received by one of Clinton’s closest aides had been backed up on her husband’s computer, including some to and from Clinton.

Comey decided that he would have to reopen the investigation of Clinton and alerted congressional leaders in a letter that was immediately leaked. Trump cheered the decision: “What he did, he brought back his reputation…What he did was the right thing.”

Two days before the election, Comey sent another letter to Congress reporting that there was nothing new in the emails on the Clinton aide’s husband’s computer, and thus Comey again lost Trump’s confidence.

Trump won the presidential election with very small margins in several swing states. It was clear to Clinton and many others that the FBI chief’s inappropriate actions had hurt her cause.

In March of this year, Comey gave open testimony to the House intelligence committee confirming the FBI was investigating inappropriate connections between the Trump administration and the Russian government—an inappropriate revelation for the director of a counterintelligence agency.

Comey also testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 2, when Trump tweeted, “FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! The phony Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?”

Trump apparently decided last weekend to rid himself of Comey, who was, by many accounts, deeply involved in supervising the Russia probe. The Wall Street Journal and others have reported that investigators are working on intelligence reports suggesting that Trump or his associates have business dealings or investments that are tied to the Russian government. So far, this theory has not been supported by public evidence.

Memos for the Files

Trump asked the attorney general and the deputy attorney general to supply letters outlining the defects in Comey’s handling of the Clinton matter. Under that cover, the president then said that he accepted their recommendation that Comey be fired. (Trump also has told other stories about the dismissal.)

By his own actions, words, and tweets, the president has come under suspicion of putting his interests ahead of America’s. To make this mess useful, the nation’s chief executive should disclose all his business and financial relationships, including his tax returns and other records, and all the investigations should be managed outside the FBI and the Justice Department by a relentless, nonpartisan independent counsel appointed by Congress.

Trump often says that the people don’t care about his tax returns, and his supporters do seem blissfully uninterested in the details of his rise and his wealth.

But public officials have a more exacting responsibility. What matters most is whether the president has profited, politically or corporately, from an inappropriate connection to a foreign government.

Editorial page editor THOMAS G. DONLAN receives email at tg.donlan@barrons.com

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