President Bill Clinton. Wikimedia Commons The only other time in history an FBI director was fired, it was under dramatically different circumstances.

In 1993, Bill Clinton became the first US president to dismiss the head of the bureau. He did so after the Department of Justice produced a 161-page internal report with sworn testimony from more than 100 FBI agents citing the numerous and severe ethical failures of its director, William Sessions.

Clinton called Sessions twice the day he fired him — once to inform him he was dismissed and again to remind him his termination was effective immediately. He then held a press conference to explain his decision. He also had Louis Freeh lined up as a replacement.

Clinton's moves are in dramatic contrast to President Donald Trump's Tuesday dismissal of FBI Director James Comey, who was overseeing an investigation involving the president's campaign.

The White House said that Trump relied on two brief letters of recommendation. One came from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former campaign surrogate who had recused himself from investigations involving the Trump campaign but waded into the debate about Comey's dismissal. Sessions' deputy, Rod Rosenstein, wrote a lengthy memo detailing his concerns about Comey.

Sessions and Rosenstein recommended Comey be fired based on his handling of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. But Trump said on Thursday that he was going to fire Comey "regardless" of either Sessions' or Rosenstein's recommendations.

Trump had his personal bodyguard, Keith Schiller, deliver a short letter to the FBI informing Comey of his termination. Comey, in Los Angeles at the time, found out via TV news reports that he had been fired.

The rationale

The Justice Department's report about William Sessions, published in January 1993, recounted how the director frequently abused his power and misused FBI resources to fund travel and vacations for him and his wife, Alice.

Sessions "improperly billed the FBI nearly $10,000 for a fence around his home, and refused to turn over documents on his $375,000 home mortgage, which investigators said they suspected involved a 'sweetheart deal,'" The Washington Post reported at the time.

Twenty-four years later, Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions' letters to Trump about Comey — which the White House at first claimed was the impetus behind Comey's firing, but which Trump later said only supplemented the decision he had already made — argued that he had mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server by circumventing the attorney general last year and holding a press conference to announce the FBI would not recommend criminal charges against Clinton.

"I cannot defend the director's handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken," Rosenstein wrote in a letter dated May 9.

Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Rosenstein also criticized Comey's decision to tell Congress 11 days before the election that the FBI would revisit the probe — a move that both Trump and Sessions applauded at the time.

Trump told NBC's Holt on Thursday that he thought Comey was a "showboat" and a "grandstander," and multiple reports emerged following Comey's dismissal that Trump was furious with the director for a testimony he gave before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Wednesday.

Trump made his displeasure with Comey clear even before the director testified, saying in two tweets the night before the hearing that 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?"

Comey was heavily criticized, primarily by Democrats, for breaking with FBI protocol and being unusually forthcoming about the Clinton email probe. But he did not appear to violate ethics rules, as William Sessions had. FBI agents interviewed by The New York Times said they did not support Trump's decision to fire Comey, and Acting Attorney General Andrew McCabe said on Thursday that the FBI still had full confidence in Comey at the time he was fired.

Indeed, agents interviewd by the Times said they were shocked that the president would fire Comey amid an investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia during the election.

The public statements

The two presidents also took dramatically different approaches in coordinating and defending their decisions to the public and the press.

"In recent months, serious questions have been raised about the conduct and the leadership of the director of the FBI, William Sessions," Clinton told reporters at a press conference on July 19, 1993. "I asked the attorney general, Janet Reno, to assess the director's tenure and the proper response to the turmoil now in the bureau.

"After a thorough review by the attorney general of Mr. Sessions' leadership of the FBI, she has reported to me in no uncertain terms that he can no longer effectively lead the bureau and law-enforcement community."

Trump's first public statement about Comey's firing was a tweet slamming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who suggested Americans would view the firing as a cover-up.

"Cryin' Chuck Schumer stated recently, 'I do not have confidence in him (James Comey) any longer.' Then acts so indignant," Trump said.

Over the next several hours, he blasted Democrats and claimed they were hypocrites because of their past statements about Comey.

Trump also took aim at Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who said a special counsel should be appointed to oversee the FBI's investigation into Russia's election interference because it could implicate the White House.

Meanwhile, White House aides scrambled to defend the president's decision on cable news on Tuesday night after first saying they would not comment publicly.

On Wednesday afternoon, Trump tweeted: "Dems have been complaining for months & months about Dir. Comey. Now that he has been fired they PRETEND to be aggrieved. Phony hypocrites!"

Trump told NBC's Lester Holt on Thursday that he made the decision to fire Comey before meeting with Sessions and Rosenstein, contradicting statements the White House had been putting out since Tuesday night about the DOJ officials' letters being the impetus behind the firing.

The context

Clinton was criticized for waiting six months after the Justice Department released its report about William Sessions' misconduct to fire him. He later said he had been waiting for Reno, then the attorney general, to review the report and recommend a course of action because he didn't want Sessions' dismissal to be politicized.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the current White House deputy press secretary, said on Wednesday that Trump did not fire Comey immediately after he was elected because he "wanted to give Comey a chance." But his confidence in Comey had been steadily eroding, Sanders said, to the point where he agreed with the recommendation Comey be fired.

Multiple media outlets have reported, however, that Rosenstein and Sessions formulated their rationale for dismissing Comey after Trump decided to fire him.

Trump had become increasingly frustrated with the media's coverage of the FBI's investigation into Russia's election interference and whether his campaign was involved, according to reports. That coverage intensified after Comey's testimony last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI was still examining "whether there was any coordination between the Russian efforts and anybody associated with the Trump campaign."

President Donald Trump and FBI Director James Comey. Getty Images

On Monday, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates added fuel to the fire, testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that she warned the White House in January that the national security adviser, Michael Flynn, could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail because of his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.

On the morning of Yates' hearing, Trump tweeted she should be asked, "under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel."

Some Republican senators asked about those leaks, but Democrats homed in on how the White House did not ask Flynn to resign until 18 days after Yates' warning.

"The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax," Trump tweeted hours after Yates' testimony. "When will this taxpayer funded charade end?"

Days before he was fired, Comey asked the Justice Department for more resources to expand the Russia investigation, according to The Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Federal prosecutors also in recent weeks issued grand jury subpoenas to associates of Flynn.