Firing Comey: Is Trump Crazy Like a Fox?

Is Donald Trump crazy for firing FBI Director James Comey and opening the door to facile Saturday Night Massacre comparisons, complete with nervous Republican sprints to the exits? Possibly he is crazy. Why not? Everybody else in the Swamp seems to be-- what with Republicans dithering on do-or-die legislative initiatives and the White House allowing itself to be suckered into another opportunity-wasting round of the old Mideast Peace Process (this time, as the TV commercial goes, “He went to Jared”) as well as throwing a few more Afghanistan chips on the table as if the Afghan political elite needed more graft-derived Rolexes.

Sure, pique, frustration and anger may explain Trump’s move, but maybe not. We are told by White House leakers that Trump is livid over the persistence of the fable that Russia colluded with his campaign. He can’t want that story around by election time in 2018, and he may have realized that Tweets and nattering House and Senate Committee folderol are not going to do the job. It is possible that the President has now determined that the way finally to get the Russian monkey off his back, and sink the irredentist “Resistance” Democrats besides, was to shove James  Comey out of the way and free Justice Department prosecutors, aided by  an FBI that  has allegedly been  dismayed by the Director’s histrionics, to slam that monkey onto Hillary Clinton’s padded shoulders by indicting her at last for violations of various secrecy statutes. Mounting a successful prosecution would entail the government proving that her lapses resulted in exposing U.S. secrets to Russia. The prosecutors’ evidence would tie Hillary’s arrogant disdain for the security rules she concluded apply only to the Little People with inevitably heavily redacted, but still arresting-enough, proof of how her irresponsible actions delivered sensitive information to our enemies. Meanwhile, if the White House can get their feet untangled sufficiently, they can make the political case, contrasting imaginary Trump collusion with actual betrayal by Hillary Clinton, irrelevant distinctions a la Comey of whether it was deliberate or not, dismissed along with him. And if they really work at it Trump advocates might even manage to break through the media noise, finally persuading wavering voters that the Blame Putin offensive was a Democrat Cover Up, aimed at protecting party Capos like Secretary Clinton, her husband, and their soldiers from the Clinton Foundation and the Podesta Family, among  others—characters actually implicated in major conflicts of interest respecting Russia and Russian actors—through the clever diversion of fingering  a few misguided Trump hangers-on and small-time grifters.

An aggressive combined Post-Comey legal/political Hillary/Russia counteroffensive would also help stiffen the spines of congenitally-skittish Republican pols and office holders. After all, a Who Helped Russia? offensive against the Democrats would have special appeal to America First /Lock Her Up voters, reinforcing allegiances which could otherwise be threatened by Administration legislative and fiscal policy moves that appeal more to independent voters or hitherto Democrat interest groups.

Mr. President, unleashing the Justice Department and pairing a Clinton prosecution with a welcome fact-based defense against the Russian canard may be useful, and it is certainly more promising than what you are doing now. While it is no substitute for delivering on your stated goals, it just may help you achieve them, and it sure looks like you need all the help you can get right now.