I mentioned in the earlier post that it feels to me like the White House is losing control of this story. I want to follow up by looking at what White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in today’s presser. She said a lot that was all over the place. But I want to focus on her essentially giving three overlapping and at least partly contradictory explanations for why the President fired James Comey.
The first was a version of the story from yesterday: the DOJ leadership told him to. According to Sanders, Rod Rosenstein visited the White House Monday and told the President that he believed Comey should be fired. The President, in essence, asked for it in writing. He received the letters Tuesday and promptly acted on the advice and fired Comey.
She also said that the President has been thinking about firing Comey since he entered office and has slowly lost confidence in his leadership of the FBI. I thought I heard her say that he’s thought about firing Comey every day since he was inaugurated. But I couldn’t find that in the transcript. If she did say it, it would be one of the few statements I find credible.
Sanders also said that the President was particularly troubled by Comey’s testimony last Wednesday in which he described and justified his decisions to make public pronouncements about the Clinton emails probe. He was apparently disturbed that Comey disregarded the DOJ chain of command. This was just one more thing, in Sanders’ telling, that sapped Trump’s confidence. It may even have been something like the final straw. In one of several references to Comey’s Wednesday testimony Sanders said …
I think the biggest catalyst was last Wednesday. Director Comey made a startling revelation that he had taken a stick of dynamite and thrown it into the Department of Justice by going around the chain of command when he decided to take steps without talking to the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General when holding a press conference and telling them he would not let them know what he was going to say.
(Let’s note that nothing about this part of Comey’s explanation was new.)
These explanations are not entirely contradictory. Trump could have slowly lost confidence in Comey, felt it was the final straw when he saw Wednesday’s testimony and then been receptive when the Deputy Attorney met with him soon after and advised him to fire Comey. Set aside for the moment that it is facially absurd that the President fired Comey for being unfair to Hillary Clinton. Even on its own terms these overlapping explanations have the look and feel of a collage – every conceivably plausible theory pasted together to create what we might call credibility through bulk rather than an organic reality or coherent explanation that might actually be true.
We’re back to the starting point. There’s no credible reason to believe that Comey wasn’t fired because of the Russia probe. It’s so obvious as to almost defy the need for explanation or restatement. With just slightly less certainty I think we can say that the only reasonable explanation for why Trump would take this step is that he knows or at least seriously fears there’s profoundly damaging information the investigation will unearth.
The situation is similar to what unfolded with the wiretapping claim. The President does something or says something that must be justified and explained. A reality and a backstory is then created in which it can make sense. In Monday’s Yates testimony I was struck by the fact that even now the great majority of questions from the Republican senators were ultimately rooted in the President’s wiretapping claims. Yes, they’ve been prettied up with the addition of ‘unmasking’. But they all stem from the same efforts to fashion some reality out of the President’s claims that President Obama had him wiretapped.
The problem is that the President acts like an impulsive child, with very little forethought to most of his actions. He routinely does or says things that are either facially absurd or deeply incriminating. It’s hard to make those claims and actions make sense or seem like anything but what they are.
