Donald Trump finally put beleaguered FBI Director James Comey out of his misery.
While speaking at a FBI field office, Comey found out about his termination via a television report – and thought it was a practical joke. It was not. As Sam Cooke sang, “It’s been a long time comin’.”
Now Elizabeth Warren is leading the Democratic rallying cry as to why Comey was fired.
Warren claims Trump fired Comey to impede the investigation into collusion with Russia over election interference.
She said,
“Donald Trump doesn’t want anyone coming any place close to an active investigation into the relationship between the Russians, the Trump campaign, and Donald Trump himself.”
The problem is there’s a major flaw in Warren’s theory.
The Trump-Russia story has been a non-stop press bonanza. Firing Comey doesn’t make the investigation, an investigation that obviously sprawls beyond the purview of one man, disappear.
If anything, the firing will bring more scrutiny to the investigation. If Trump were truly guilty, the last thing he would want is more intensity on the issue.
From the National Review:
The firing will draw more attention to Comey than ever before, at least in the short term; it won’t shut down the Russia investigation, which will continue as before, just with a new leader at the top; it will stoke even more suspicions about Russia and magnify any new revelations; it might well embroil the White House in a contentious confirmation battle that re-litigates the Comey firing and focuses on the Russia controversy; and if there isn’t a confirmation battle, it will only be because Trump picks someone with a sterling reputation who is pledged to follow Russia wherever it leads. So if this is an attempted cover-up, it will almost certainly back-fire.
For this reason, the cover-up narrative makes little sense.
If the firing was tied to the Russia investigation, it was probably due to the fact Trump was annoyed at the snail’s pace of the fruitless probe.
After almost a year of digging, the only “links” are Mike Flynn’s mild transgressions and a discredited intelligence report about Trump and Russian escorts (which was propagated by a Russia-backed Democratic research firm).
Whatever the reason, the Comey circus needed to end. Democrats championed him when he prematurely (and as a rule of law, perhaps incorrectly) cleared Hillary Clinton of criminal wrongdoing.
Then Democrats hated him when he reopened the investigation so close to the November election.
They hated him even more when he recently explained his thought process on both decisions last year.
Then Democrats hated him even more when recent news broke that he misspoke (and possibly perjured himself) when he said Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin routinely sent classified documents to her husband Anthony Weiner.
The Republicans weren’t big fans of Comey throughout this saga, either.
That’s why people on both sides of the aisle called for his firing for months. Yet now that it actually happened, it’s a national outrage.
When members of congress can’t keep their Comey narrative straight, what chance does Joe Q. Public have?
During Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue, he announced breaking news that Comey had just been fired, and his left-leaning audience cheered uproariously, much to Colbert’s chagrin.
Apparently it takes a full news cycle for partisan narratives to be formed and disseminated to the masses.