At 10:00 p.m. Eastern on a Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired the Deputy Director of the F.B.I., Andrew McCabe, 48 hours before the brother got his pension.

In entirely related news, Donald Trump has joined the motion to remove the Stormy Daniels case to federal court, in hopes that a federal court will be more likely to invoke the arbitration clause in the NDA she signed.

An internal F.B.I. investigation allegedly recommended that McCabe be dismissed for “lack of candor.” But that report is not complete and McCabe was set to retire anyway. McCabe told the New York Times that he believes his reputation is being besmirched in order to damage his credibility as a witness in the Mueller investigation:

In an interview, Mr. McCabe was blunt. “The idea that I was dishonest is just wrong,” he said, adding, “This is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness.”

You can believe what you want about the reason for the firing, but the timing is beyond obvious. Trump wanted to do two things. Number one: he wanted to strip a “disloyal” employee (according to Trump’s despotic view of “loyalty”) of his pension. That’s just wrong and petty.

The second reason for the timing is just as obvious. An hour before Sessions brought the ax down on McCabe, Trump joined his lawyers in trying to get the Stormy Daniels case removed.

YOU WON’T SEE THIS ON TWITTER, FOLKS. No no no, Donald Trump does not tweet about his alleged affair with the adult actress. But Trump’s decision to join the removal motion counts as the first “public” statement Donald Trump has made about the alleged affair. From the NYT:

Mr. Trump formally joined his legal team’s response to Ms. Clifford’s suit in a motion, filed Friday, to move the case from state court in Los Angeles, where Ms. Clifford filed her claim, to federal court. Mr. Trump’s reason for asking that the case be moved probably concerns the Federal Arbitration Act, which makes arbitration the preferred forum for resolving many kinds of disputes. Federal courts have applied that law more strictly than state courts, particularly ones in California. Mr. Trump may be hoping that his chances of keeping the dispute in arbitration and out of public view are better before a federal judge than a state one.

These two stories are linked. Trump DOES NOT want you to be talking about Stormy Daniels, and he is straight-up parading heads-on-sticks to distract you.

I’m… distracted. Firing the deputy director of the F.B.I. to punish him for being willing to tell the truth to investigators is, you know, a big problem. A bigger problem than the possibility that the President had sex with a porn star then paid her hush money to go away. In fact, the only reason I keep bringing up Stormy Daniels is to piss off the President.

Here’s how warped things are in this country: we are living in a world where Trump is firing people to distract from his sex scandal, which itself is a distraction from who he is firing, that he’s only really firing to cast doubt on the investigation into his obstruction of justice, WHICH HE ALREADY ADMITTED TO OBSTRUCTING ON TELEVISION!

Meanwhile, while Trump ordered the hit, Confederate Attorney General Jeff Sessions pulled the trigger. Which… sigh… was EXACTLY the right thing for Sessions to do. Trump is searching for a non-Russian pretext to fire Jeff Sessions too, and Sessions isn’t about to give him that kind of opportunity. Jeff Sessions is not getting distracted by any of it. The long game is the Mueller investigation and Sessions probably knows that if he refused to fire McCabe simply because it was unethical Trump would have pounced on him. Scott Pruitt is out here measuring drapes in Sessions’s office. He’ll fire anybody Trump wants. If Sessions wanted to keep his job, he simply had to remove McCabe from his.

All of this is petty and wrong and gross and damages the country. But Trump supporters don’t care about that, Paul Ryan refuses to do anything about that, so… wheeeeee. Down the drain we go.

We live in a failed state.

Andrew McCabe, a Target of Trump’s F.B.I. Scorn, Is Fired Over Candor Questions [New York Times]

Trump’s Lawyers Claim Stormy Daniels Violated Confidentiality Agreement at Least 20 Times [New York Times]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.