Image via Brookings Institution/Flickr CC
President Donald Trump’s abrupt and bizarre firing of FBI Director James Comey has all the trappings of the Saturday Night Massacre, the epochal moment in the Watergate saga that ultimately proved Richard Nixon’s undoing.
Will the Tuesday Night Massacre spell Trump’s demise? At this point, no one – not even the savviest observer – knows. But this much is certain: from a purely communications point of view, the last thing Donald Trump wanted was to invite television networks to exhume archival footage of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and Attorney General Elliot Richardson defying an out-of-control president, as their anchors invoke phrases like “constitutional crisis,” “the rule of law,” and “Hamilton’s and Madison’s checks and balances.”
Donald Trump is about to find out how seriously many Members of Congress – Republicans among them – take their oaths to uphold the Constitution and how conscientious members of the press are in exercising their First Amendment freedoms.
Suddenly the Trump presidency has taken on a whole new patina – and the optics are not good. Trump’s signature phrase from reality TV, “You’re fired!”, may backfire in the unsparing reality that is the nation’s capital. His campaign and perhaps his administration, after all, are being investigated by the FBI, the House, and the Senate for potentially treasonous ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin, the people whose computer hacks and phony news undermined American democracy last fall.
Thomas M. Boyd, the co-chair of DLA Piper’ Government Affairs Practice Group, served Republican presidents as a senior official in the Justice Department. We talked just hours after the Comey firing on Tuesday evening.
“James Comey’s removal as Director of the FBI by President Trump follows a detailed memo authored by Comey’s boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,” Boy elaborated Wednesday morning.
“In that memo, Rosenstein cites Comey’s questionable conduct last July in conducting a news conference in which he, an investigator, assumed the role of a prosecutor, which he once was, by detailing the evidence the Bureau had gathered against Hillary Clinton and declaring, in effect, that no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges against her. Before writing his memo, Rosenstein consulted with former Deputy Attorneys General and Attorneys General from both parties and cited their unanimous belief that Comey had acted improperly.
“Even though ‘cause’ is not required to remove an FBI Director, Rosenstein’s memo would seem to provide enough detail to define the term. That said, I also believe Comey to be a decent, honorable man who mishandled and exercised very poor judgment about a very visible and important matter but who also deserved to have been informed about his dismissal in a more professional manner than he was.”
The rationale that Rosenstein used in his letter was, at best, curious, especially from someone on the job for all of two weeks! For many observers, the trigger for the Comey firing appears not to be his slapdash handling of the Clinton email investigation but his all-too-sturdy handling of the Russia investigation.
Suddenly we’re supposed to believe that Trump is outraged that Comey had poorly treated Hillary Clinton during and after the campaigns? This from the same president who repeatedly lauded Comey, including extolling his “guts” in the final days of the campaign and praising his reputation for fairness and independence?
We don’t know for sure where Comey’s investigation of Trump’s Russia ties was headed. But appearances would suggest he was heading someplace that the president didn’t like. We do know that grand juries have been empaneled, that two weeks ago Comey requested additional funds to conduct his investigation, that subpoenas were issued on Tuesday, and that the probe appears to target Trump’s senior-most foreign policy advisors, if not the president himself.
All of which points to why Trump should have exercised extreme caution in this matter. By firing Comey in such ham-handed way, Trump guaranteed that the Russian connection would roil Washington for the foreseeable future. He also guaranteed that calls for a special prosecutor would become deafening – and not just from Democrats. Republicans, too, are worried about the rule of law and a president who just might believe he is above it.
Why doesn’t this White House have a David Gergen or a Howard Baker, a gray eminence who can tell the president he’s making a grave mistake and stirring up a beehive he’ll regret?
Richard Painter, who served as President George W. Bush’s ethics attorney and is a prominent member of the conservative Federalist Society, is already calling for an independent counsel and bluntly taking Trump to task for undermining the integrity of the Russia investigation. Painter won’t be the only Republican making that argument.
In communications and in politics, perception is reality. But as Donald Trump is about to learn, it’s not reality TV. This isn’t just another episode of “Celebrity Apprentice” where everything is forgotten and next week brings a new set of contestants and contrived issues.
Candidate Trump was brilliant at the quick hit and dominating one news cycle after another. But by putting the Russia connection front and center, President Trump now confronts much more than control of a news cycle or the challenge of ginning up next week’s ratings.
The Comey firing cuts to the heart of American democracy and our hallowed system of checks and balances. If this truly is Watergate redux, then Congress, the media, and all the rest of us have big jobs to do.
About the Author: Richard Levick, Esq., @richardlevick, is Chairman and CEO of LEVICK, a global communications and public affairs agency specializing in risk, crisis and reputation management. He is a frequent television, radio, online, and print commentator.
Read Next
