Trump Fires FBI Director Comey

On someone in Congress or their staff

Mueller also briefed Burr and Warner today behind closed doors.

Did not’t take long for Warner’s staff to get on the horn to the Post 😀. That’s almost the only power the Democrats have left.

Great leaders hire the best people, give them what they need to do their best work and remove obstacles to that end, then let them do it.

Sounds like Mueller is a great leader.

Pretty much everyone I follow (political) on Twitter thinks trump is going to fire Mueller.

Doing so would be of course catastrophically stupid … but, trump.

People who are saying, “Trump is going to fire Mueller” should really be saying, “Trump is going to try to fire Mueller.” It’s legit not clear that he can (Rosenstein is on record saying that only he, Rosenstein, has the authority to do so.)

Ok, so Trump is going to fire Rosenstein, then he’s going to fire Mueller.

If firing happens then it all comes to a head right away. Trump is basically saying his best chance is to go all-in and hope he weathers the storm, to mix my metaphors. Rationally it might be his highest percentage move – at least if there’s even more terrible things they investigation will dig up.

It’s scary. If Trump does it, it might sink him right then. But if it doesn’t then there is literally no stopping him no matter how many lines he might cross.

Technically, Trump would have to keep firing people until he got to someone who agreed to carry out the order. So the next guy would be the solicitor general, Jeffrey Wall.

The thing is though, the DOJ is already operating with a skeleton crew. Remember when Trump fired everyone? Yeah, those positions were not filled. Because Trump is incompetent.

Lots of folks resigned too… and this would likely cause even more resignations.

The result would be that Trump would have no DOJ, which would mean he couldn’t actually enforce anything. He’d be completely impotent.

If only Nixon had had Sean Hannity at the plate for him in '73

I’m curious why people think Trump firing Mueller would be politically bad for him. He openly admitted that he fired Comey because of the investigation in to him and both his base and republican politicians did not care at all.

If it worked one time, why wouldn’t it work a second time?

I think we would have to get to the level of absolute lunacy (disbanding the supreme court, disbanding the senate, etc) before the base/republican politicians would abandon him. Anything short of that is just going to be swept under the rug. The base won’t believe it and republican politicians will think it is worth putting up with to get their stuff passed.

But it didn’t work for him. Quite the opposite.

Before he fired Comey stuff was percolating at an uncomfortable rate under the covers and the public was mostly focused on whatever ridiculous thing Trump was tweeting about at 3:30 in the AM.

AFTER he fired Comey stuff began to erupt all over the place. The DoJ had to appoint a special counsel and everyone and their uncle wanted to talk to a very angry Comey. Plus he managed to piss off a good chunk of GOP Senators who before then had been mostly willing to just see what would happen with the FBI investigation.

Firing Mueller would mean that the Senate would have to step up to home plate or else lose any credibility. They would either have to reinstate him, start aggressively running their own show, or both. GOP Senators from almost all states need Independent voters to win… they cannot win with just the ever-shrinking Trump “base”.

Also, Trump wasn’t under investigation by Comey. He IS under investigation by Mueller’s team, which tends to put a different spin on things. Not to mention that he had every right to fire the FBI director whenever he felt like it. Not so with Muellet. Dismissing Mueller would have to be for cause (I forget the exact term).

WaPo of course broke the story, but WSJ has an interesting bit that might be paywalled off for many.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-probe-examining-whether-donald-trump-obstructed-justice-1497490897

The special counsel also plans to interview Rick Ledgett, who recently retired as the deputy director of the NSA, the person added.

While Mr. Ledgett was still in office, he wrote a memo documenting a phone call that Mr. Rogers had with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. During the call, the president questioned the veracity of the intelligence community’s judgment that Russia had interfered with the election and tried to persuade Mr. Rogers to say there was no evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russian officials, they said.

This may be why Coats and Rogers refused to testify on anything Trump said to them.

I think the other thing trump can do is remove the DoJ regulations for appointing a special counsel.
Ultimately if this happens, there would have to be public outrage and for voters to put so much pressure on House and/or Senate Republicans that it would become politically untenable for them to let trump get away with it. Make no mistake, if this happens and Republicans won’t do anything, then trump effectively will be acting above the rule of law.

But Neal Katyal, a partner at the firm Hogan Lovells and former Acting Solicitor General who wrote the special counsel regulations almost two decades ago, says that ultimately, Trump has the constitutional authority to fire who he wants, and the power to repeal the regulations.

“Our Constitution gives the president the full prosecution power in Article II; accordingly, any federal prosecutor works ultimately for the president,” Katyal wrote in the Washington Post last month. “That constitutional reality is not something we could write around with a regulation.”

lol

I’m sure the offer comes with a free polonium-enriched spa bath.

John Marshall games out what happens should trump find a way to fire Mueller:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-very-very-dangerous-situation

if Trump fires Mueller he will have made clear that no investigation of the bundle of Russia-related issues is acceptable. Anyone who took it on after Mueller would know that as soon as the probe heated up or press reports confirmed the seriousness of the investigation that person would also be fired. Would another legitimate person even accept an appointment after that? It’s hard to see. It may be best to say that accepting an appointment under those conditions would be prima facie evidence of unfitness for the job.

I cannot think of a set of facts in which a President makes more clear that they will use the statutory powers of the presidency to render themselves above the rule of law. That sounds like a hyperbolic statement, I know. But look at the facts we’ve just walked through.

And the only recourse left is the House.
That does not engender warm fuzzies.