Firing Comey: The 'Blunder Of The Decade?

“It was a blatant abuse of executive power: a ‘thuggish, venal act’ of the like not seen since Nixon”

“When Donald Trump was merely a real estate mogul, he exaggerated flamboyantly,” said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. For instance, he promoted Trump Tower as a 68-storey building, though it only has 58 floors. When he was a presidential candidate, he lied enthusiastically, falsely claiming that he’d always opposed the Iraq War, for example. Now he is president – and he is still “spinning bald-faced untruths whenever it suits his purpose”. His tall tales began on his inauguration day, when he celebrated record crowds that weren’t, and reached an apogee last week, with his ever-changing story about why he decided to fire James Comey as the director of the FBI. Initially, the White House declared that it was merely following the advice of the deputy attorney general: Rod Rosenstein had reviewed Comey’s performance and ruled that he’d mismanaged his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. But it later emerged that Rosenstein hadn’t offered to write that memo: he’d been told to do so. Then Trump declared that he’d been planning to fire Comey for months, because he was a “grandstander” and a “showboat”.