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But if Trump’s every move suggests he has something to hide, that does not mean firing Comey will have no impact on the investigation. Trump need not install a more compliant director to further slow its progress. He can, as David Frum has suggested, simply leave the office vacant for months on end, as he has hundreds of others. Neither should Comey’s firing be seen in isolation: this is the third senior legal officer Trump has dismissed, after acting attorney general Sally Yates and New York federal prosecutor Preet Bharara. All three were responsible for various aspects of the Trump-Russia investigation.

As crude and obvious as Trump’s obstruction of justice may appear, in other words, that does not make it any less obstructive, or less defiant of a foundational principle of any law-based state: that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law. Those fine minds who think the really essential point to make at this moment is that it is “perfectly legal” for Trump to fire the FBI director, or that the Democrats didn’t care much for Comey either, might wish to consider how they became so blind to context. Whatever Trump’s powers, whatever Comey’s mistakes, for the president to fire the FBI director in the very middle of an investigation into his administration — an investigation that, whatever his protestations, is very likely to touch upon the president himself — is self-evidently unacceptable.

The immediate imperative is to see that Trump does not succeed in the attempt: to carry on with the various congressional inquiries into the affair; to appoint a special prosecutor to oversee any criminal investigation; and so on. But the implications of what has just happened go well beyond the specifics of the case.