Trump bites the hand that investigates him
[ by Charles Cameron — as i tweeted, if you fire the guy who’s investigating you, that’s ouroboric – it creates & instantly breaks the circle, too ]
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Okay, the Comey firing.
Shortly after President Trump‘s firing of FBI Director Comey today, Jim Hanson of Frank Gaffney‘s Center for Security Policy commented on Fox:
You know, this may be the first bipartisan thing Trump has done that both sides can get behind.
It was an extraordinary comment. That’s not how the Wall Street Journal saw things. Their headline and sub-head read:
Comey Dismissal Upends Probes of Trump Campaign Ties to Russia
Move adds impetus to calls for a special counsel to handle the case
Quite the opposite: I’ll show you nonpartisan:
Nonpartisan, right now, means disturbed by the firing, by its timing, by its implication for ongoing investigation into Team Trump’s ties with Russia..
And as John Schindler notes:
The optics of firing the FBI director investigating your Russia ties then meeting the Russian FM on THE VERY NEXT DAY defy easy description.
Or Blogs of War:
When you fire the guy who is investigating you on Tuesday and meet with your case officer on Wednesday..
Ahem: case officer..
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From my analytic point of view, alert for pattern and archetype, what leaps out here is another damned ouroboros — this whole place is getting to be quite a snake-pit.
Trump has in fact bitten off the hand that was investigating him. Or to put that into Politico’s prose:
The extraordinary dismissal of the FBI director by a president whose own campaign is the focus of an ongoing FBI investigation is sure to produce a torrent of criticism that Trump is interfering with the independence of law enforcement.
There’s even a sub-ouroboros, given that Trump cited a letter from AG Sessions as contributing to his decision — as Sen. Schumer noted in his press conference:
Attorney General Sessions, who had recused himself from the Russian investigation, played a role in firing the man leading it.
Maybe we could call that “recusal of the recusal”?
May 10th, 2017 at 4:53 am
Just so:
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May 10th, 2017 at 1:09 pm
To be trite about it, crocodile tears by members of the inside the beltway ruling class and its aspirants about the decisive termination of one of the consummate members of the inside the beltway ruling class? Give me a break.
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This is what I figure. This firing was public and intentionally humiliating. It was a message meant to be received by people at Comey’s level at a lot of other multi-letter agencies. If that is true it is long overdue. Keep it up Donald! A high level head rolling around on the ground helps to remind the courtiers who the actual boss is.