The Comey Effect

I said to my colleagues shortly after Trump's tenure started that one day, his tendency to kick the hornets nest in order to change the news cycle was going to come back to bite him. It's difficult to overstate the amount of damage that his twitter account, his interview with Lester Holt, and his harebrained idea to fire James Comey has done to his presidency.

As I've said on twitter, the intelligence community (IC) as a whole is very close-knit and fiercely protective of their own. The way that it's been described to me is like a sibling relationship; they may give each other hell on a regular basis, but YOU better not do it. It's no coincidence that the first Trump leaks started coming out around the time he was bashing the IC as a whole, during the later stages of the campaign and shortly before and after his inauguration. The icing on the cake was the absolutely disrespect speech he gave at CIA. Hint: nobody at CIA gives a damn about the size of your inaugural crowd, Mr. President - particularly in front of their memorial wall.

Fast forward to this week.

In Trump's ever-present quest for self-validation, as is often the case, narcissism won the day. He couldn't stand the thought of Comey getting more attention than him. He couldn't stand the thought that Comey had something to do with his victory. That's why he made the decision when he did, after Comey claimed that he was mildly nauseous at the thought of influencing the election. Oh, and there's that Russia thing, which Comey is believed to have been increasingly concerned about. The WSJ reported that he was getting Russia briefings more frequently and beginning to believe that evidence of collusion existed. The view at the FBI, most of the MSM, Congress, and most anyone else with a brain, is that the Comey firing was because he was getting too close to the Russia story, and because he was taking the spotlight away from Trump. Hint: It's not going to stop the FBI.

Of course, Trump won't admit any of that. So what does he do? He throws a hand grenade into the middle of the organization that is most likely to bring him down. Not only did he fire Director Comey in about the most disrespectful way possible, he qualified it with things like, "he's doing a bad job," "the FBI is in turmoil," "morale at the agency is terrible," "he doesn't have the respect of the rank and file," etc, etc. All of which is 100% BS. And as you can imagine, inside the agency, all of these comments went over like a fart in church. All he's managed to do is galvanize everyone, even the agents that weren't particularly a fan of Comey, which I'm told was a very small minority. Remember when I said that the IC is fiercely protective of their own? Yeah. They're pissed. Notice, the day Comey was let go, people in the know started the casual drip-drip of leaks, both to defend their fired director, and undermine the POTUS narrative. At this point, we haven't even gotten to the dumbest thing Trump did. And no, I'm not talking about the private Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak... I don't need to tell anyone how incredibly stupid that was.

Friday morning, May 11th, 2017, the sitting President threatened the former head of the FBI on Twitter: "James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

Mr. President, at this point the Nixonian comparisons write themselves, so I won't even go there. But, if you really want tapes, I'm sure the FBI, NSA and GCHQ will be more than happy to help you out.

Cutting this a little short because North Korea just launched another missile and I want to follow the developments on that. More to come in my next post about Trump driving away prominent GOP, including Burr and McCain.

Thanks to everyone that is part of the resistance. The investigative journalism is outstanding. The main stream media will catch up one day!

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
- Martin Luther King Jr.