They said he’d never be able to get away with behaving like this; that the fury and threats of his Twitter feed would come up against the sobering realities of government.
But those who thought President Trump would be neutered by Washington were wrong.
For all his misjudged tendency to talk publicly about investigations that should be secret, Mr Comey is widely admired for his integrity and independence — not least by Trump himself, who blew him a kiss in January and praised his ‘guts’ in reopening a probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails just before last year’s election.
Comey has run America’s most important law enforcement agency since 2013 and had six years to serve. Yet he was ejected like a losing contestant on Mr Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice, with an abrupt note telling him he had been ‘terminated’.
The White House machine attempted to insist that Comey was sacked after an investigation into his handling of the Hillary email case. But as Trump was swamped yesterday by ferocious accusations that he’s engineering a cover-up and abusing his power, it was clear that nobody in Washington buys the official line.
Comey’s demise, they are convinced, is entirely to do with Russia — and Trump’s growing frustration at the FBI inquiry into claims that members of his team colluded with the Kremlin to help him win the election via the hacking and leaking of sensitive information about his opponents.
Donald Trump may have shrugged off accusations of misogyny and racism over the past year. But the suggestion that he or close aides might be Russian agents, willingly propelled into the White House by Muscovite dirty tricks, is a dark cloud hanging stubbornly over his presidency.
It was claimed yesterday that the President had been mulling over sacking Comey for more than a week after becoming ‘enraged’ by the continuing Russia investigation. He had reportedly asked aides repeatedly why the controversy — which he has dismissed as ‘fake news’ — wouldn’t disappear. Sometimes, he ‘would scream at television clips about the probe’, said one underling.
That angry petulance has long been a feature of his character. When you’re a billionaire businessman, you probably think you can yell at employees as you please. But the same isn’t true of the President.
So will Trump’s latest act backfire appallingly? Some Democrat congressmen argued that the mere fact he was willing to sack his FBI chief — the first time a president has done so since 1993 — suggests Trump is convinced that he will be implicated.
As Adam Schiff, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, put it, the sacking ‘raises profound questions about whether the White House is brazenly interfering in a criminal matter’.
If the President’s political opponents weren’t previously determined to see the Russia inquiries through to the bitter end, they certainly are now.
Ted Lieu, a Democrat congressman, appealed to FBI agents to remember that their oath of office demands loyalty to the country’s justice system rather than to the President.
Amid all the rancour, it was deliciously ironic that the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov arrived at the White House yesterday, less than a day after the FBI director was sacked.
He was there for talks on Syria and Ukraine but — in a telling illustration of a recent thawing of relations between the Trump and Putin camps — felt he could crack a joke about the biggest story in America. When asked about Mr Comey, he said with a sarcastic smile: ‘Was he fired? You’re kidding.’
The row has also reminded people of the extraordinary dossier compiled by a former British MI6 agent alleging that the Kremlin had sensational compromising information against Trump over his activities in the past in Russia.
Allegations — strenuously denied by Trump and generally not regarded as credible — referred to tawdry accounts of hijinks with escort girls in a Moscow hotel.
For all his insistence that he has nothing personally to answer in the Russia collusion investigations, the President is certainly not out of the woods.
Sources say that the FBI has what one describes as ‘concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and [Russian] agents relating to the use of hacked material’ from Democratic emails last year.
There is no doubt that Trump and his family have had extensive and well-documented business dealings with Russians since the Eighties…
READ MORE HERE: Has Terminator Trump sowed the seeds of his own downfall? | Daily Mail Online
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