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Comment by TheBiv | Hacker News Reader

"Trump just fired the man leading a counterintelligence investigation into his campaign, on the same day that the Senate Intelligence commitee requested financial documents relating to Trump's business dealings from the treasury department that handles money laundering." -Comment from reddit that sums up how strange this is.

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The man at the FBI leading the investigation into the Trump / Russia connection was fired upon recommendation from Sessions who said he was recusing himself from all Russia / Trump investigations.

Looking corrupt as hell? Most certainly.

At this point Trump is looking more and more like Nixon on fast-forward.

Fast-something. Nixon created the EPA, trump is on rewind there. I think nixon was more his own person, this guy seems a sponge for whoever spoke to him most recently. In that way he is more similar to many historical kings than modern presidents.

And I'm guessing he's going to freely get away with much more than anything Nixon did.

Thanks to the GOP who doesn't care about any abuses coming out of the White House because they want to get tax cuts for their millionaire friends they are allowing the integrity of our systems to erode.

At some point you simply make too many enemies.

Dems already hate him and this removal continues his conflict with the traditional GOP.

He's either gonna cross the wrong person or be so unpopular that he's gone in a few more years and nobody will care.

There doesn't seem to be any Democrat involvement with this. Every recent development is to do with Trump-Russia investigation.

Seems unlikely that Democrats would have supported him much, but it sounds like they weren't asked to -- they were told at 5.30pm that he was fired, same as everyone else!

FWIW, it has been 43 years since

> The United States House Committee on the Judiciary opens formal and public impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=May_9&oldid=77960...

Minus the intelligence and a number of other factors. I seem to be the only leftie in America that rather admires Nixon despite his numerous flaws and considers him a bit of a tragic figure. In an earlier and scrappier era he'd have been considered a great statesman.

Like another comment pointed out, Nixon created the EPA for chissake....unthinkable thing for a Republican today.

Ooh, if you like that one, you should read up his proposal for health care. Were it not for that little Watergate kerfluffle, the whole ACA debate might have never taken place, and the U. S. might have had decent healthcare. (A lot of supposition behind that, though.)

In other words, comparing Trump to Nixon does a disservice to Nixon, IMO.

...and Ronald Reagan instituted the first cap and trade system in the US for the phase out of leaded gasoline, and then a few years later used cap and trade again to reduce the chemicals that damaged the ozone layer. Also unthinkable in today's GOP.

I like to troll time travel threads by joking about warning Nixon.

People don't like it.

Even the Nixon Library trolled Trump:

  FUN FACT: President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI #FBIDirector #notNixonian

https://twitter.com/NixonLibrary/status/862083605081862145

A very good Nixon parody account is @dick_nixon: https://twitter.com/dick_nixon

Trump also complained that senate rules were unfair to him and congratulated Erdogan on seizing more power and is meeting with Duterte. He just wants to be a strongman and is not afraid to remove obstacles.

To be clear, Sessions said he concurred in the recommendation of his deputy Rothstein, who is a life-long prosecutor. Plus, virtually every former Attorney General agreed that Comey made a terrible mistake in announcing the results of the Clinton investigation.

Yes, indeed I think the supreme irony is that Comey is, in effect, being fired by Trump for helping Trump get elected.

That is the reason they are putting on the books at least. The fact that he is leading an open investigation into Trumps campaign, and that Trump can replace the head of that investigation with another person now is interesting though.

Firing him around January would have had some creedence, not now months later after praising him for months and Trump finding out that Comey has been investigating him and his campaign for almost a year now.

Rod Rosenstein became Deputy Attorney General on April 26th.

Having him write the memo recommending the action isn't really all that strange and goes quite a ways towards explaining the timing.

People would have complained that it was about the investigation anyway in January.

No one knew of the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, even former DNI Clapper, until Comey testified as such on March 20th. Trump firing him any time after this date reeks of a coverup no matter the explanation.

That's when Comey publicly confirmed it, but news about the investigation has been leaking since the moment Trump was elected.

That's just not true. The first credible reporting on the existence of the investigation came from CNN, 10 days prior to Comey's testimony in March.

CNN is credible for anything relating to Trump? What was the actual source?

News is now coming out that Rothstein threatened to resign when the White House was saying that Rothstein was the one who originally wanted to fire Comey. Rothstein wrote the letter, but Trump was the one who asked him to write it.

This is impeachment level shit.

For other ESL speakers wondering why they didn't find much when searching for "rothstein": his name is "Rod Rosenstein".

Yeah, that was one of my first thoughts about this. I have no love lost for Comey but there's a huge conflict of interest here with Trump and I think the reasons for Trump firing Comey are not the reasons I would want him fired. Comey was doing a balancing act, playing one constituency against another.

It seems like Trump is purging everyone who might provide any level of oversight whatsoever.

"Conflict of interest" is practically the man's middle name. Not only does he not avoid them, he seems to actively seek them out.

You probably shouldn't drink anything while reading this.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/10/eric-trump-nepoti...

A nitpick.

He didn't actually say "nepotism is a beautiful thing".

While I absolutely do not agree with Trump or his family and what they are doing, I hate to see when people, with a subtle twist change the meanings of what people say.

Trump has done enough to fuel negative press for decades. We don't need to make stuff up.

It doesn't say he said that. The quotes are only around "beautiful thing."

Here's the actual quote: "Is that nepotism? Absolutely. Is that also a beautiful thing? Absolutely. Family business is a beautiful thing."

I think the description is reasonable, and they make it abundantly clear that the first two words are a paraphrase.

I'm pretty sure there's no conflict of interest. He has only one.

James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Monday that he still has not seen any evidence of any kind of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian foreign nationals.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-N.C., asked if Clapper's prior statement was correct, when he said on NBC that there was "no evidence' of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. When asked if that is still accurate, Clapper said Monday, "it is."

On NBC weeks earlier, Clapper said, "We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, 'our,' that's NSA, FBI and CIA, with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/james-clapper-still-no-evi...

but he didn't know of the FBI investigation at first, and is not privy to the details of that one.

Not to mention he's quite out of the loop these past three plus months, being formerly employed, and all.

Why does he use language like "We did not include any evidence in our report"?

Does this imply that there was evidence and he did not include it?

The full question and answer which addresses this: https://youtu.be/FrS8kid6baw?t=34m14s

I watched that NBC interview here: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/former-dni-jam.... Right after Clapper answered, the interviewer asked him whether the information exists, and Clapper answered that it does not to his knowledge, but he does not know whether more information has come to light since he left office.

The entire existence of spooks is about deception. That's why they don't speak directly or truthfully.

It's more-or-less a Glomar response, crafted to neither confirm or deny that evidence exists. This is frankly the right thing to say when there's an ongoing investigation and the results aren't made available to the speaker.

The only person that is able to answer definitively whether the investigation into Trump and his administration has produced credible evidence of collusion with Russia was just fired by Trump today.

So Comey was personally conducting the investigation solely on his own?

No, he was leading the agency that was conducting the investigation. And a pliant leader, appointed by Trump, may not continue to do so.

Or he may simply actively sabotage an investigation so it ends up saying that nothing is awry.

Fired. Not murdered.

Yes, but anything he says from now on can be dismissed as being based on out-of-date information.

I thought Clapper clarified today that he didn't mean there was no evidence, only that he was uninvolved and did not know of any evidence.

Lack of knowledge of evidence != no evidence.

Instead of relying on selected quotes from the Washington Examiner, you could read the (declassified version of) the report:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3254229/ICA-2017-...

From my quick skim, I would say that the report isn't about collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign but about how Russia's means and motives in interfering in the election.

Just so readers are aware, the Washington Examiner is a conservative leaning org. The "no evidence" quote was pulled from this sentence: "There was no evidence of that included in our report."[1] There is a difference between "not aware of evidence" and "no evidence".

[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/05/09/parroting-t...

That is really highly misleading that they would state it that way.

Graham is a Senator from South Carolina, not North Carolina

Clapper and Yates also testified yesterday that they weren't privy to the results of the FBI's ongoing counterintelligence investigation, which is where evidence of collusion would come from.

"Strange" is not the word you're looking for. This is blatant, naked corruption.

Yep. The great irony here is that Comey almost single-handedly got Trump elected with that late press release about Clinton being under investigation still.

That is far from clear: https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/11/13/role-obamacare-premium...

Well, McConnell helped when he strongarmed Obama and Comey into shutting up about the Russia connection when Comey brought it to the gang of eight ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence) )

The implication of this comment only holds if the replacement FBI Director drops the investigation. The FBI Director themselves are not conducting the investigation, but have instructed the investigation to be conducted. It stands that we should expect the investigation to continue in Comey's absence. Should it cease, this comment would gain merit.

The reasons cited for the dismissal appear valid on their face: the handling of the Clinton email investigation had a measurable impact on the election and perhaps could have been handled better.

So you're saying you find it plausible that Trump fired Comey an excess of administrative zeal on Comey's part might have led to Clinton's loss of the election.

I might find your position more persuasive if Trump didn't display an almost-daily disregard for administrative norms and procedures. I highly doubt that his new nominee will be told to not obstruct any ongoing investigations.

That deputy AG letter seemed to imply that the reason for the firing was Comey publicly berating Clinton last July, against policy -- the act that Trump praised Comey for at the time. And lets not forget Trump hugging Comey at their first meeting after he took office.

If these were the actual reasons, they would have been triggered months ago during Trump's early firing sprees. There's clearly an unnamed (but obvious) proximal cause.

A tweet from cstross: "In iterated prisoner's dilemmas, Trump ALWAYS defects. Take note."

> So you're saying you find it plausible that Trump fired Comey an excess of administrative zeal on Comey's part might have led to Clinton's loss of the election.

Yes, that is the stated reason: http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/politics/fbi-dire...

edit: better source

I'm saying that I don't find the stated reason plausible, not least because most of the reasons offered in the letter were known many months ago. Comey could have been invited to submit his resignation back in January if Trump were worried about the appearance of impropriety. I don't want to turn this into a political slanging match but the appearance of propriety seems to be pretty far down his list of concerns.

I agree it's fishy, but "plausible" isn't a high bar to clear. I do think it's plausible. Regarding the timing, the request came from the Deputy Attorney General who started two weeks ago.

It's possible Trump waited until now to assign the request to him to write up, but it just doesn't seem like something he'd do. He's an impulsive blowhard and if he wanted to fire Comey I'd practically expect it over Twitter, not via some covert, deniable request to the Deputy AG.

This obviously rests heavily on our respective prior beliefs. All I can say is I will heavily reconsider my position if a bad AG is nominated. I think you should, too, if it turns out, say, the now-acting AG remains in office for the rest of Trump's turn, which seems like a reasonably positive outcome to me.

Do you mean,

"Yes, [I believe that it is plausible because it] is the stated reason [and that alone is sufficiently convincing]"

"Yes, [in case those in the audience didn't catch it,] that is the stated reason [if you can believe it!]"

The latter, but probably without the exclamation point.

Trump praised Comey at the time for how he handled the Clinton email cluster.

This is the difference between soft and hard power. With hard power the investigation stops, with soft power it's deprived of resources and faces higher hurdles.

Or ends up being conducted by someone who has already come to a conclusion.

How childish is it that they had to put in the termination letter something about "thanks for telling me three separate times there's no investigation ON ME"? It's almost like this administration is run by 8 year olds.

The structure of the FBI is created by the Director. To remove the Director of the FBI, is to essentially force a restructure of all the top agents and top management of the FBI. Those top agents run investigations.

If that's not an efficient way to stall an investigation, I don't know what is.

The Director has to run the confirmation gauntlet of the Senate. A Trumpian yes-man will not survive that ordeal.

The Senate confirmed DeVos, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that the GOP will bend for Trump.

You don't need a yes man in charge to force a restructure, you just need someone new. An "interim" director who is in the position for a year+ forces a sufficient change to the structure.

sure, he bungled that during the election, but the reasons for dismissal are total nonsense given the timing. im sorry, you really dont find it suspicious? betting markets had comey at 95% change of being FBI director on 6/30 before 3 hours ago. this is a total shock to everyone, please dont act like this makes perfect sense.

Plot twist: it was all an elaborate cover for a plot to take revenge on a former casino rival by anonymously placing an outsize bet.

We are all living in Absurdistan now.

> The implication of this comment only holds if the replacement FBI Director drops the investigation.

How can you possibly trust the authenticity of an investigation headed up by someone hand chosen by the person being investigated, who knows the person they pick will immediately be in charge of the investigation?

If Trump is truly innocent, this is literally the worst thing he could have ever done for himself. This action will form the basis for doubt in plenty of people who could otherwise have been convinced nothing happened.

At this point he is so far past "the appearance of impropriety" that I doubt it can cause him any harm.

It isn't merely about dropping the investigation, it is also setting the tone. The investigation can be denied resources for years, or whatever the investigation reveals can be undermined. An investigation doesn't have to be dropped to be sabotaged.

If that were true, he should have been fired in January. Why was he fired now?

> only holds if the replacement FBI Director drops the investigation

I think everyone can easily think of another scenario where the implication of the original comment still holds true.

Want to take a stab?

That is quite surreal: http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/politics/senate-russia-investi...

Would there be any collaboration between the FBI and Senate Intelligence committee?

Maybe Trump is a genius painter in the closet. A dyslexic Dali channeling is talent through tweets and EOs.

As a painter myself this gave me a hearty giggle.

Painters, in my opinion, should not be heads of state. Once was quite enough.

Are you talking about Bush or Hitler?

To be fair, Bush seems a lot nicer after he took up painting

Winston Churchill was also a painter, so there's that. I know your comment was lighthearted but get enough unsolicited criticism without being tagged as supervillains-in-waiting.

Only surrealists ones

SEE EDIT

~~ He also fired the federal judge who ruled against him in Hawaii. So it's not like this is new behavior. ~~

Don't worry though, this is fine.

Ed:

I'm likely misremembering bluster as taking action, since I can't find specific citations. So I retract the comment, and would strike through it (I don't like deleting text), but don't know if I can on HN.

Do you have a link for that?

So I googled the claim that Trump fired the Federal judge in Hawaii and the answer seems to be that the President cannot fire Federal judges. https://www.quora.com/Can-Donald-Trump-fire-a-federal-judge-...

I cannot find any evidence of this claim.

He can't fire a federal judge. There is a due process for impeaching a federal judge from the bench. Neither can Department of Justice (which is part of the executive branch), it is one of the best preserved traditions of our Checks and Balances, despite some of rulings are not agreed by majority (do I have to bring up the stupid ruling of Judge Persky on the People vs Turner case). Therefore, we can't fire or replace a Supreme Court judge except the Congress.

You are probably mistaken that for the firing of the acting AOG Sally Yates for mandating Department of Justice to not to defend Trump's travel ban executive order during her tenure, and the termination of New York-based U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara who was known for going after Wall Street scandals (and who, according to Trump, did not return Trump's calls multiple calls).

--Edit--

I found [1] to be an interesting article on whether impeachment of a judge is limited to Congress.

[1]: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/removing-federal-judges-...

The person more at fault in the Turner case is the probation officer who recommended such a light sentence. The judge idiotically accepted their recommendation.

I think the case for idiot judges that really makes the case for me is this one: http://reason.com/blog/2011/03/08/tennessee-cops-posed-as-a-...

TL;DR: a detective impersonated a defense attorney and got the victim to incriminate himself. The original judge in the case let them use the evidence in court and didn't immediately throw that shit to the curb. The appeals judge ripped them a new one though.

There's also the case of a judge in Michigan banning a guy from the internet for having a date over Tinder when he accepted a plea deal that the prosecutor then convinced the judge to double back on. https://ballotpedia.org/Dennis_M._Wiley

Well, I think both are idiots. I didn't know the probation office was involved. But judge has the final say in the sentencing.

There are many ridiculous rulings, some are harmless and for giggles, but some are seriously fucked-up like Turner's case or those you linked.

Maybe you meant "he also fired [tweets at] the federal judge".

You might be thinking of Preet Bharara, the US Attorney for the Southern District of NY which would have been in charge of prosecuting the Trump corp, who was fired abruptly by Trump after refusing to resign.

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