ON THE TRUMP TEAM: THE RIGHT HAND KNOWS NOT, WHAT THE LEFT HAND IS DOING

…Former Director James Comey, swearing in for his last official Senate hearing

 

The FBI Director’s dismissal could have been, “simple, a gold watch and a friendly farewell”, but this one was from Donald J. Trump!

 

OK, let’s look at how the lie from President Trump’s latest activity was so egregious, that it caused Trump’s subordinates to offer their counter lies to the American public, regarding the firing of the Director of the FBI.

 

The lie is that it is not feasible that the FBI director was fired for actions committed back in July 2016, when Comey publicly recited various email misdeeds by Hillary Clinton, despite recommending against her prosecution.

 

Let’s face it, even when Comey reopened the Clinton investigation 11 days before the election, Trump’s campaign was in total turmoil.  The Access Hollywood video of Trump’s comments about groping women had just been released and the interviews of the women that had been groped, and were threatening to sue Trump, was being introduced.  There were also other issues about his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s past relationships with Russian oligarchs that were starting to surface. 

 

 

The best thing that could happen to Trump’s campaign were these actions by the Director of the FBI.

It is also ridiculous that the president would consider firing the director based on the recommendation of a sub-Cabinet, Justice Department official named Rosenstein, whom Trump hardly knew and who’d been on the job all of two weeks. Trump only makes those decision after receiving inputs from his family members or his close and loyal personal advisers.

 

Just as with other mistakes that Trump continues to make, he could have easily let Comey go the day after his inauguration, as there was bipartisan sentiment at the time for letting Comey go. It would have been simple, clean and understandable.  As one op-ed writer put it, “A simple talk, a gold watch, a friendly farewell, a Comey resignation to allow the new president to pick the new director. No fanfare, no rancor.”

 

It is true that Comey has been having to operate in unknown territory, and he did make a number of mistakes.  He was in an unprecedented position with undesirable choices. Never in American presidential election history has  there been an election where both party’s candidates campaigns were involved in official FBI investigations.  This made the normal rule that FBI directors are not to interfere in national elections impossible to follow. Any course of action of disclosure or silence, commission or omission, they all offer issues of electoral consequences. 

The truth is that it has become well known that the media’s focus on the Russian connection to the election has really been getting to Trump and his surrogates.  They are all going after the media for spending too much effort on the Russians, the Trump campaign, and the Russian’s involvement in the US election.

 

If Trump thought this firing of Comey would kill or cut the Russia story, he has once again made a big mistake.  Getting rid of Comey has brought more attention to the Russia / US election story than anything you can imagine. This will also inflame the FBI investigation and those in the agency that are still loyal to Comey.

 

When there eventually is a nomination for a new FBI Director, the confirmation hearings will be nationally televised and it will also become a forum for collusion allegations.  So far, these allegations have only been a scandal, not a real crime as yet.  That could change with more FBI investigation.  Please note: Comey had just gone from getting weekly updates to getting daily up-dates on the Russian connections.  Is something happening there…?

 

The way Trump has handled this firing, it is now being referred to as a political ax murder, brutal even by Washington standards.  Trump didn’t have a meeting with Comey. There was no letter of resignation requested, there was no presidential thank you, no cordial parting. Instead, there was a blindsided Comey, at a recruiting event in Los Angeles where he found out he was fired from a local TV station report.  He didn’t even know if he was going to be allowed to fly back to Washington on the FBI plane that he arrived on.  Instead of him personably receiving the firing letter, the letter was delivered in a manila envelope to his attention at the Washington FBI headquarters by Trump’s former bodyguard.  This was firing a Director of an organization with almost 30,000 employees.

In addition, there was no communication strategy for dealing with this major dismissal of an FBI Director.  So, what was being announced in the media and at the press briefings versus what Trump said in his interview with NBC, they were all not conveying the same message as to why Comey was fired.

 

Yes, it was another of Trump’s Royal Cluster Fxxx Ups!

 

Unfortunately, with this administration……. the manure just continues to deepen.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017