Former FBI Director James Comey. Courtesy, Guardian UK

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

By Reed Galen

When in the course of 2017, President Donald Trump has almost a week of relatively normal existence, he will detonate a political neutron bomb within his own government and be surprised when Washington goes apoplectic. To read the headlines last night, or a Twitter feed or cable news was to watch the political talking head set (yours truly included) rise up with a collective, “WTF?”

Not because Jim Comey acted in a confusing manner and over-politicized the FBI amid a presidential campaign — he did those things. The tidal wave of responses erupted from a decision that made sense neither in its timing nor its purported reasoning and added gasoline to an already smoldering dumpster emblazoned with “Russian Interference” on the side.

Reasons? We Don’t Need No Stinking Reasons!

According to numerous reports, President Trump’s trigger finger started itching last week. Why? The press says that Trump didn’t like seeing Comey getting so much face time on television. The White House says it’s because the FBI needed a fresh face and a new start after Comey’s actions regarding Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, actions which Trump himself applauded on the campaign trail. Perhaps the president and his men realized that Comey wasn’t going to give up on Russia and they needed to move him out before things got really ugly. Or perhaps, it’s because Jim Comey is six foot eight inches tall and POTUS simply doesn’t like someone towering over him — either politically or physically.

Whatever the case, if you think Jim Comey is now spending more time with his family because the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions were so appalled by his handling of Hillary-Gate, I’ve got an office tower in Jakarta to sell you. Daily, the Trump White House dismisses veracity in the name of the president’s whims — and that’s what these are — the impulses of an extremely powerful, mercurial and hyper-sensitive man. Now 111 days in, why do Trump and Company continue to tell whoppers only a six-year-old think they could get away with? Because they’ve seen no real or threatened consequences. Trump’s modus operandi has always been to push forward as fast and as hard as possible and let his opponents deal with it.

Org Chart or Rorschach Test?

I’d like to study the folks at the White House and within the Administration who thought Comey’s firing wouldn’t be a big deal. I want to know what they’re smoking, how long they’ve been smoking it, and if they listed this hobby on their SF-86 forms. The conjecture on who knew Trump would fire Comey, and when they knew it, is already a parlor game. In Trump-world, it is totally within the realm of possibility that much of the senior staff didn’t have any idea Comey would be fired yesterday. If Trump, as has been reported, directed Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to come up with reasons to dismiss Comey, many Assistants to the President might have been as surprised as the rest of us.

The White House Organizational Chart

Trump loves to play his people off against one another; he thinks that’s effective — I think it’s more likely that he thinks it’s fun, and funny, to see people scramble to clean up whatever mess he’s just made. Then, to prove their fealty, he sends them out before the media’s firing squad to tell the world that his nuttiness makes perfect sense. That’s asking a lot of loyalty from a lot of people. Given the sieve-like nature of this White House to date, he shouldn’t count on it much longer.

First the Spies, Now the Cops

Before he’d even taken office, President Trump went to war with his own intelligence service, the CIA. He went to their headquarters, stood before a wall commemorating their honored dead, and proceeded to be as ugly as he could be. He’s tweeted his disdain for them. The spies at Langley took note, reacted accordingly, and will be on their own team for the next three-plus years. And because upsetting one massively powerful institution wasn’t enough, the president has now set the FBI on a similar path. Perhaps the only people more loyal to one another than spies are cops.

If Trump fired Comey because the former director wasn’t taking leaks seriously enough, his strategy is about to boomerang on him. FBI agents take their jobs and their integrity extremely seriously. For that, they expect, and have been accorded, a significant modicum of respect from Washington’s political side. If FBI headquarters or the Washington Field Office now feel that they are fighting the bad guys, their bosses at the Justice Department and the president, Trump won’t be able to hire enough Russian plumbers to plug all the leaks.

If there was some strategy to all this, which I don’t believe there is, you could attempt to make out the faint finger prints of Steve Bannon. If your stated goal is to deconstruct the administrative state, starting with the CIA, the State Department and now the FBI would be a good way to go about it. Few other institutions within the US government have as much power, influence and support across DC as these three organs.

Russians Literally Laughing at Us

This morning President Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. During a photo-spray with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Lavrov made a joke when asked about Comey’s dismissal. He trolled us, the entire country, every American, on our own soil, in regard to our top cop being fired, smiling in Foggy Bottom. If you’ve read anything about Russians and how they operate, they too act however they want until someone pushes back on them.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Mid-Troll at the State Department

Lavrov, and by extension, President Vladimir Putin, are laughing at us. They planted the seeds of doubt within our electoral system last year, and are happy to have Trump tied up in knots as his administration tries to move on from the Russia investigation. They’re winning both sides of their bet right now. What do we have? A president whose biggest smiles are reserved for those who should be recognized as our biggest geopolitical adversaries while not bothering to call Jim Comey personally to tell him he was being fired. Instead, Trump had his security guard deliver the letter to FBI headquarters. That Comey learned of his dismissal on television, while speaking to FBI agents in Los Angeles, probably tickled the president to no end.

Where Does Authority Flow?

Who’s in charge now? How will decisions be made within the FBI or within the 93 US Attorney’s offices that remain vacant for want of nominees? Given the nature of Sessions’ relationship with President Trump, we shouldn’t expect that honest investigations into Russia or anything that Trump finds remotely threatening, will take place. When he asks the FBI to become the country’s chief leak enforcer, what happens when they don’t comply?

The answer is simple and concerning. Trump is doing what he’s historically done; coalescing a small group of hyper-loyalists around him, removing any opposition, and rolling on along as if nothing is the matter. Sitting on the 55th floor of Trump Tower that’s his prerogative. Sitting in the Oval Office, where he is responsible for the welfare of 320 million Americans and by extension billions of others on the planet, it strikes of a classic authoritarian power play.

It’s Not About Us, It’s About Him

The number of columns and articles by anti-Trump conservatives is flooding cyberspace this morning. In the US Senate, several prominent Republicans have already made statements voicing significant concern regarding the timing, method and rationale for Comey’s firing. Perhaps because they’re only up every six years, these GOP members feel more comfortable about breaking with the White House. Some of them have never been fans of President Trump and this gives them a perfectly legitimate reason to distance themselves from his chaos.

Trump is no Republican. He’s a Trump. That translates to someone who looks out for themselves at the expense of all others. Whenever he goes before a madding crowd and tells them he’s going to make America great again, he should add, “So long as it’s great for me first.” The president didn’t fire Jim Comey for the good of the FBI. He didn’t fire Jim Comey because of Hillary Clinton. He fired Jim Comey because Trump saw him as a threat, and worse, a threat with an independent power base. That is an untenable position in Trump’s world.

What was Comey onto? Maybe something, maybe nothing. The psychology of Donald J Trump is not difficult to discern: his Twitter rants, as Tom Nichols noted yesterday, give the entire world, our enemies included, direct access to his thinking. Trump always believed himself to be the master of his own world. Now he believes he’s the master of the entire world. Like Gollum with the Ring of Power, his perception will only twist and contort as his time in office continues. As Kellyanne Conway noted in an interview last night, “He’ll do what he wants to…”

Is Comey’s firing a Constitutional crisis? No. The president is well within his purview to fire the FBI director. Is it the next chapter in our collective identity crisis? Yes. President Trump will continue to act with impunity, and truly put us on the path to a Constitutional crisis, until members of both parties, the media and citizens around the country begin to tell him enough is enough. Trump may believe it’s all about him, but it’s not. We need to send him daily and constant reminders that he serves us. The United States and its people are not, nor should they ever be, at his disposal to further his own enrichment and aggrandizement.

Mr. Trump, after all this, have you no shame?

Copyright, 2017. Jedburghs, LLC.

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