What is he afraid of?

Richard Fulton

You may have heard that President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.

This is the same man who praised James Comey last October for his ‘guts” in making public new Hillary Clinton emails from her aide to Anthony Weiner (of all people). The timing, it is claimed, hurt Clinton in the election only days away.

It is the same man who on Jan. 22 assured Comey that he would stay on as head of the FBI and even threw him a kiss across the room at the reception.

Now the president thinks Comey treated Hillary wrongly. The same Hillary he and his national security advisor Mike Flynn exhorted his campaign audiences to chant “lock her up.” “Crooked Hillary.”

But the problem seems to be Trump’s dislike for professional, nonpolitical, justice department leadership. He fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates when she refused to defend his Muslim travel ban. He fired all U.S. attorney’s in the country including Preet Bharara the aggressive Manhattan U.S. Federal Attorney he earlier promised to keep on the job.

Most new presidents replace the nation’s Federal Attorneys but not all at once and immediately. Most are given time to settle their offices’ key cases and find new jobs.

And, of course, he fired Mike Flynn but only after he had been warned by the FBI and President Obama about his lying about his connections with Russia. And even then he waited weeks to do so.

But James Comey became a liability to the president when he refused to confirm that there was any evidence that the Obama administration had bugged Trump. And regardless of what the president’s letter firing Comey said, he refused to stop investigations into the Russian connection to Trump’s campaign which could lead to Trump himself.

Comey did say that there was no evidence as of yet of any Trump involvement in contacts with the Russian ambassador and other Russian agents. He did not pre-judge anything, importantly, but would follow the evidence.

Comey was continuing to press the investigation when he was fired. A Virginia grand jury, for example, had just issued subpoenas as an aid to FBI investigations of people around the Trump campaign for president.

Remember, all of the American intelligence agencies, and there are several of them, agreed that Russia had meddled into the American election process. How and who was involved is the basis of the FBI investigation.

The process of the firing seems suspicious also. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a man close to Trump and his campaign, had to publicly state he would recuse himself from any Russian investigation or any Hillary investigation. Yet he instructed the newly appointed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to write the letter giving Comey’s Hillary actions as the reason for Comey’s dismissal.

Is this what he means by recusal? Seems Comey’s investigation of the Russian connection was too aggressive for the president. If you believe that Comey’s handling of the Hlllary affair was the real cause, you are rather naive.

A clue to the real reason came from White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee the night of the announcement. “Frankly it’s kind of getting absurd,” she said. “There’s nothing there,” to the allegations of a Russian connection. “It’s time to move on.” Indeed?

There are ongoing Congressional investigations and there is widespread popular support of these and for the FBI investigations.

Clearly an independent counselor should be appointed to carry out an investigation. Get partisan politics out of it. Russian interference into our political process is simply not acceptable and we need to know who is helping them.

Richard Fulton is an emeritus professor of political science.