Donald Trump now says that he wishes he’d fired FBI director James Comey sooner. Like … sooner than he was fired. Sooner than Trump took office. Sooner than he squeaked through the election. Sooner. As part of the same interview with The Hill in which Trump moaned that having Jeff Sessions around as AG made him “sad,” Trump really rolled back the clock on Comey.
Trump: If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries. I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don’t want that guy. Or at least fired him the first day on the job. ... I would have been better off firing him or putting out a statement that I don’t want him there when I get there.
The skull-aching wrongness of this is hard to overstate. It’s a statement so insane that it should come with an 25th Amendment pre-approval sticker.
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller co-authored a letter to tell James Comey he was being fired because he wouldn’t drop the Russia investigation and pledge personal loyalty to Trump. When Don McGahn and Rod Rosenstein pointed out there was a slight problem with Trump firing the guy who was leading an investigation in which he was a suspect, Trump ordered Rosenstein to go off and provide him a cover letter—one in which he fired Comey because Comey was too hard on Hillary Clinton. And Trump held to that excuse … for almost 12 hours, before he sat down with Lester Holt and admitted he fired Comey because he wouldn’t drop the Russia investigation.
So Trump’s connection between the firing of James Comey and reality has always been tenuous at best. But the new statement … trumps Trump. Here is Trump declaring that he should have fired the head of the FBI before he was in office. Because of course that’s a thing that could have happened.
But while Trump seems to have a problem with the arrow of time and the relationship between cause and effect, The Hill reports that he was able to quote, from memory, texts between former FBI agents Peter Strzok and “the lovely” Lisa Page. Because nothing focuses a faltering mind like paranoia.
Trump spent a good portion of the interview the same way he spends many of his morning Twitter sessions: attacking the integrity of the FBI and Department of Justice. In addition to pulling out the phrases “witch hunt” and “it’s a hoax,” he dived straight in the Pizzagate-level conspiracy theory that pulls snippets from the hundreds of messages exchanged between Strzok and Page and turns them into a scheme to … let Trump win, then undermine his office, because that would … something.
Trump has particularly latched onto the phrase “insurance policy” claiming that the FBI had plans to “destroy his presidency.”
Trump: Number one, how illegal is it? And number two, how low is it? … even Democrats agree that it has been discredited. They are not going to admit to it, but it has been totally discredited. I think, frankly, more so by text than by documents.
In addition to the texts between Strzok and Page, Trump has ordered that every Russia-related text from James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Bruce Ohr be declassified, along with a stack of documents related to the investigation. Trump claims he hasn’t read any of these documents, which is easy to believe, but expresses confidence that they will “prove the FBI case started as a political hoax.” Based on previous declassified emails and documents, there’s no doubt that Trump, the alt-Reich media, and Trump’s allies in the House will also follow through by acting as if the documents show a conspiracy, not matter how little they actually reveal.
Trump has been warned that declassifying these documents endangers FBI assets and methods, as well as setting the dangerous precedent of someone under investigation acting to damage the mechanism of that investigation. However, Trump says that he expects damaging the FBI to be one of his “crowning achievements.”
And don’t worry. If Robert Mueller returns a report showing that Trump has committed crimes, Trump will simply fire him—before the investigation began.