Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was for firing James Comey before he was against it. That point was made explicitly clear when CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed him yesterday. In November of 2016, he called for Mr. Comey’s firing saying, “What Jim Comey did was so highly improper and wrong. From the very beginning in July, he was putting his thumb on the scales right then. And it's unforgivable for a police agency to opine, frankly, publicly about legal conduct. The president ought to fire Comey immediately, and he ought to initiate an investigation."
Keilar followed up by asking why he's troubled by this decision now, when he wanted him out then? Nadler pretty much said it’s different because what he said was from last year. He also said that President Obama would have been able to pick someone who wasn’t beholden to the subject of the investigation. Right now, President Trump is the subject of an investigation; with Nadler saying the investigated cannot fire the investigator. Okay—but Trump has been a subject of this Trump-Russia investigation by the FBI since July of 2016. This isn’t new. Moreover, Mr. Comey wanted to write an op-ed about the extent of Russian interference in the summer of 2016, but was stopped by the Obama White House. So, it's not like Mr. Comey was Trump's pocket. He also reportedly thought that President Trump's claim that Obama wiretapped him was ludicrous. CNN’s Jake Tapper reported that sources, anonymous ones mind you, told him that a) Trump wasn’t convinced of loyalty; and b) the Russian probe was an “actively accelerating” one, hence his ouster.
No word of the loyalty part, but the thing that Democrats have clung to like a barnacle was that this was done to impede the Russian investigation. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe just debunked that this morning, saying that Mr. Comey’s dismissal won’t impede the Bureau’s investigation into the matter.
So did Trump fire the guy investigating his Russian connections or the guy who cost Hillary the election?
— Ben Smith (@BenSmithDC) May 9, 2017
Choose your narrative quickly.
So, what it boils down to, if you’re a Clinton supporter, is that Mr. Comey screwed over Hillary Clinton from her presidential ambitions, he deserved to be punished, and Barack Obama should have been the one to get rid of him. It’s okay for Democrats to clean house, whether it’s warranted or not, but not Republicans. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) was more shameless articulating that point with NBC’s Peter Alexander. Not to mention, there are two congressional probes into the allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian intelligence to tilt the election. Both have yielded zero evidence to corroborate such an explosive claim. For a deeper dive into this, I'll send you over to Guy.
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