President Donald Trump has fired FBI Director James Comey. From The Washington Post:
“The president has accepted the recommendation of the Attorney General and the deputy Attorney General regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Spicer told reporters in the briefing room, according to a pool report.Earlier in the day, the FBI notified Congress that Comey misstated key findings involving the Hillary Clinton email investigation during testimony last week, saying that only a “small number’’ of emails had been forwarded to disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, not the “hundreds and thousands’’ he’d claimed in his testimony.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein listed why he recommended firing Comey. From CNN:
In a separate letter, rich in irony, Rosenstein laid out the reasons for Comey’s firing, arguing that it was his transgressions over the Clinton email investigation that were the cause of his dismissal.At the center of Rosenstein’s rationale for recommending Comey’s firing was the director’s handling of the investigation into Clinton’s private server, namely his decision to recommend no charges be filed and the news conference he held to explain his reasoning.Rosenstein accused Comey of attempting to “usurp the attorney general’s authority” by publicly announcing why he felt the case should be closed without prosecution.”Compounding the error, the director ignored another longstanding principle: We do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation,” Rosenstein argued in his memo.”We should reject the departure and return to the traditions (of the bureau),” Rosenstein said. “The way the director handled the conclusion of the email investigation was wrong. As a result, the FBI is unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them.”
Comey found himself embraced in more controversy this week. From Fox News:
The director told lawmakers that Huma Abedin, when a top aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, had sent “hundreds and thousands” of emails to her husband’s laptop, including some with classified information.On Tuesday, the FBI said in a two-page letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that only “a small number” of the thousands of emails found on the laptop had been forwarded there while most had simply been backed up from electronic devices.Most of the email chains on the laptop containing classified information were not the result of forwarding, the FBI said.
Judicial Watch, which has been receiving Hillary Clinton’s emails, praised Trump’s decision in this statement sent via email:
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton today issued the following statement in response to President Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey:“This is an important move to restore public confidence in the fair administration of justice at the Federal level. Mr. Comey did not seem to understand some of the laws he was asked to investigate and unfortunately politicized his sensitive positon as the FBI director. President Trump took the right step in cleaning house at the FBI.”
I will update the post when more information becomes available.
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