A President Like No Other: Donald J. Trump and the Restoring of America by Conrad Black

A President Like No Other: Donald J. Trump and the Restoring of America by Conrad Black

Author:Conrad Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 11

A Honeymoon of Hand-to-Hand Combat

It was now to be the hour of James Comey, though not in the manner that the tall, publicity-seeking FBI director might have planned. On May 3 he testified before the House Judiciary Committee and said that the Bureau had not, in his time, been asked to stop or change the course of an investigation, though advice had sometimes been given, but not more than that. He laid great emphasis on the investigation of Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election and said that “Russia is the greatest threat of any nation on earth.” He said they would “do this again, because of the 2016 election, they know it worked.” He did not expand on this, and did not claim that Russia had determined the result of the election. He said that Russia should be made to pay a price for its interference. These assertions were all far beyond his remit—it was not the business of the federal police director to pronounce on matters of geopolitical strategy. Even J. Edgar Hoover, who directed the FBI or its previous equivalent for forty-eight years, left such determinations to the eight presidents whom he serviced.

Six days later, Comey was fired by Trump, very unceremoniously, an event he only learned of by television, as he was out of Washington and the president’s letter had been delivered to his Washington office, and given the identity of the sender, had not been opened. The FBI director was entitled to greater personal consideration. The White House initially stated that the firing was at the suggestion of the attorney general and his just-appointed deputy, Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein had been critical, in a memo to Sessions, of Comey’s conduct in the Clinton investigation. Comey had certainly been presumptuous and inconsistent, even unprofessional.

Trump let it be known in interviews that, apart from what Rosenstein and Sessions had to say about Comey, Trump was annoyed because although Comey had told him three times, as Comey subsequently confirmed, that he, the president, was not a suspect in the Russian investigation, Comey declined to make that point publicly. He was thus effectively facilitating the efforts of the Democrats to immobilize the president and compromise him internationally and feed the media smear machine by pretending that a Watergate-style evaporation of executive authority was underway. (Anti-Trump commentators were predictably eager to make comparisons with President Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre”—his firing of the attorney general and the special prosecutor in 1973. These were completely incomparable events, but very few people now remembered Nixon’s actions with any accuracy.)

Comey had asked to see Trump, had dinner with him on January 27, and made clear to the new president that he wished to remain as FBI director. Comey claims Trump asked him for loyalty and Comey, instead, promised honesty. Trump was irritated with Comey because he thought the FBI director should be doing more to apprehend and prosecute the leakers within the administration, all of the leaks being criminal offenses. On February 14, Trump



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