On Tuesday afternoon, Trump released three documents relating to Comey’s firing — one from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one from Rod J. Rosenstein, Sessions’s deputy, and one from Trump himself. Trump’s letter is short — just 121 words. There is one sentence of reasoning, a sarcastic one, that leans on “the judgment of the Department of Justice.”
Getting rid of Comey was obviously Trump’s decision; the first thing Congress should do is demand that Trump stop hiding behind his deputy attorney general and explain, in his own words, why he did it. The only other dismissal of an F.B.I. director —
the firing of William Sessions by President Bill Clinton in 1993 — was backed by a 193-page report from the F.B.I.’s own Office of Professional Responsibility, which detailed Sessions’s misconduct.
So what was the judgment of the Department of Justice? Sessions’s letter is only slightly longer — 157 words. It vaguely says that the head of the F.B.I. should be someone “who faithfully follows the rules and principles of the Department of Justice.” Instead of explaining how Comey broke those rules, Sessions, like Trump, leans on his subordinate to churn out the fine print. He says that his conclusions are also “based on my own evaluation.” He gives no indication as to what his own evaluation was based on.
The third document, a “Memorandum for the Attorney General” from Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, is much longer. Some reports have Rosenstein working on the memo for a week or more; nevertheless it bears the same date as Trump’s letter.
The subject makes no mention of Comey or the F.B.I.’s leadership. Instead, it is “Restoring Public Confidence in the F.B.I.”
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/10/why-was-james-comey-fired-donald-trump-cant-find-the-words/There is indeed nothing “normal” about removing the head of the FBI from his post less than four months into a new presidency — and an FBI boss who has been credited with delivering that president his election victory, against the odds.
You have to go all the way back to 1993 to find the last — and only other — time a president (William J. Clinton) decided to dismiss his FBI chief (William S. Sessions). And the latter, unlike Comey, was accused of a long list of bizarre ethics violations including, as the Washington Post reported at the time, “charging the government for personal travel,” diverting FBI aircraft to pick up his wife, Alice Sessions, in other cities, and deploying FBI cars “to take her to get her nails done.”https://theintercept.com/2017/05/10/after-james-comeys-firing-who-will-stop-trumps-tinpot-dictatorship/
