Ashok Dhillon
Jun 8, 20175 min
A divided America arrived at a point, where a former FBI Director, James Comey, set the stage through his testimony, history of service and his integrity, to potentially and eventually bring a sitting United States President down, the President Donald J. Trump, who fired him in a manner that surely makes him (Trump) rue the day from here on out.
James Comey is of towering physical presence at 6’8”, and has an almost similar professional reputation to match, as an Attorney, a U.S. Deputy Attorney General, and most recently, as the Head of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations).
He is not perfect, and has made some high profile errors in judgment in the recent past (at least in some people’s mind), but his reputation for unquestioned integrity has remained largely intact through the self-confessed miss-steps. It is this ongoing reputation for basic honesty and professional integrity that makes him such a lethal adversary in his battle for vindication against his nemesis and reckless defamer, the current U.S. President Trump.
James Comey was leading the FBI criminal counter-intelligence investigation into the Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, and its possible ties to the Trump Campaign.
President Trump’s irritation with the ongoing investigation that had dogged his Presidency from day one got the better of him, and he specifically asked Comey to look into shutting down the investigation on the former National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn. That request, however informal, was highly inappropriate and could now be the basis of an investigation by the Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, on the President himself.
Up till now, while there were ongoing investigations into Russia’s hacking, and into some of the activities of members of the Trump Campaign team, there had been no investigation into Donald Trump’s activities itself. But with James Comey’s written and oral testimony, verifying that Trump tried to ‘direct’ the shutdown of the investigation on Mike Flynn, there is bound to be an investigation on President Trump’s activities as the sitting President, that could lead onto dangerous grounds.
Most of the details of the long and ongoing investigations regarding Russia and Trump’s campaign are common knowledge and we will certainly not reiterate them here, but we will talk about the extraordinarily unique conditions that made such unprecedented circumstances possible, and it almost exclusively has to do with the stunningly inappropriate man chosen as the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
The victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton was so improbable, and so out of the realm of possibility that months later, after the fact, it still seems not quite real. Yet somehow it happened, and not only did Russia, Wikileaks and a private server play a considerable role in it, but to a significant degree, so did James Comey. The improbabilities piled up to put in the White House President Trump, who since his inauguration has been busy breaking every possible rule of engagement expected of a President, to a point that no normal rules any longer apply.
The mere fact that Trump is still President is also testament to the fact that the American House is so divided that the Republicans have in a grotesque partisan fashion ignored his outrageous almost regular faux pas, that would not have been ignored let alone actively and near routinely been excused in more normal times. And James Comey, a lifelong Republican, in a similar manner gave Trump the benefit of the doubt, enough to allow him to win, and to continue even with clearly inappropriate behaviour.
That is until Donald Trump in his usual impulsive ill considered manner fired James Comey, and then to compound the problem went on to defame him by calling him derogatory names on a live television interview, and then, if the mistakes were not nearly grave enough, defamed him again to the visiting high ranking Russian officials in the Oval Office itself. While he ran James Comey down, Trump also went on to incriminate himself on TV, and in the Oval office by admitting that he fired Comey due to the ongoing Russian investigation.
At any other time, with any other President, and a political system not so divided along partisan lines, the ruling Republicans, in majority in both the Houses, would have done something to reign in a President that clearly is out of control, and out of the norms of Presidential behaviour. But in the current deeply fractured political environment, the Republicans have till now gone to ludicrous lengths to defend and shield the President from all his own inappropriate, and at times embarrassingly foolish behaviour, keeping at the top of the most powerful nation on earth, a man who is dangerously unsuited to be there.
Well, there too Donald Trump took matters into his own hands and fired the FBI Director for all the wrong reasons, and then went on to talk about it on television, thereby negating all efforts and explanations up to that point to try and shield him.
James Comey is a patriot, but he is also an intensely proud and professionally accomplished man, and not a person to be summarily dismissed, and then to compound the injury, publicly humiliated through the inaccurate assessment of his professional competence, and peevish name calling. As shallow and insincere as Trump is, that’s exactly what he did to James Comey, and thereby created for himself a righteously indignant, very competent and dangerous enemy, determined to vindicate himself and his beloved FBI.
James Comey has positioned himself as an American patriot, a proud professional, and a man that knows his turf, and knows how to fight back. In coming in front of the public eye through his testimony, he is going to fight to make the Republicans acknowledge, publicly, that the Russian actions against the United States in the 2016 Elections were serious (hostile) enough that partisanship must be put aside and the ongoing investigations must taken very seriously, thereby eroding the unquestioned support Trump has enjoyed so far.
As a professional, Comey is going to prove his competence, once again, by the meticulous written record of his interactions with the errant President, and the subsequent calculated and professional actions he took thereafter.
And as a proud man, although at times calculatingly self effacing, Comey is going to take President Trump to task by forcing people in the Senate and Congress, dealing with his testimony, and all those Americans and foreigners listening to him, to make the choice between his word and Donald Trump’s, knowing that the President’s reputation in that regard is heavily tainted by the very frequent publicly spoken untruths.
In his opening remarks he has already, unreservedly, labeled Donald Trump as a liar and thus not to be trusted, and hence his need to record everything said in their private meetings. By that opening statement James Comey shook the American political landscape. For such a senior and reputable former government official to openly and loudly proclaim in a Senate Hearing that the President of the United States cannot be trusted and is a liar is to send shock waves throughout America and the World. It is difficult to envision a President lasting long that is known as a serial liar and is openly put in the records as such, and a President that on the face of it, tried to obstruct justice through the intimidation of the sitting Head of the FBI. The distant bell has started to toll, and it’s tolling for President Trump.