FBI/INTELLIGENCE/JAMES COMEY/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The White House just can’t get its story straight about why President Trump decided to fire FBI Director James Comey.
When the move was initially announced — just before 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday [5-9-17] night — the White House pointed to a memo written by deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that made the case that Comey had lost support of the organization with his handling of the investigation into the private email server maintained by Hillary Clinton.
‘I cannot defend the Director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken,’ wrote Rosenstein. ‘Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.’…
As Tuesday turned to Wednesday, the story coming out of the White House began to change. Trump himself said after a photo op with, wait for it, Henry Kissinger, that Comey had been let go ‘because he wasn’t doing a good job.’
Later, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the real reason for Comey’s dismissal was the “atrocities” he had committed against the chain of command by openly acknowledging in Congressional testimony last week that he had not told the attorney general — Loretta Lynch at the time — what he would say on July 5 when he announced his findings in the Clinton case…
What the ever-changing stories trying to explain why Trump did what he did suggest is that no one either knows or wants to talk about the real reason that Trump moved on Comey.”
-Chris Cillizza, “The White House’s explanation for the firing of James Comey is totally unraveling,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, May 11, 2017 11:20am