Make no mistake, it just got real. With Comey’s firing, the United States is plunged into a Constitutional crisis that makes Watergate look like the equivalent of high school kids pulling the fire alarm on the day of final exams. Trump fired the FBI director currently examining the extent of Russia’s with our elections. From Sally Yates’ testimony on Monday, we already know the incontrovertible fact that Trump kept Michael Flynn, a corrupt, compromised liar, on as National Security Advisor for eighteen days after Yates alerted White House counsel, Donald McGahn, that Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail by a hostile foreign power.
Yesterday, in keeping with his pattern of reckless cruelty, Trump fired Comey via a letter delivered to FBI headquarters by his personal bodyguard while Comey was delivering a speech across the country in Los Angeles. Comey learned he was fired from televised news reports. Despite, or perhaps because of, Comey’s sanctimonious belief in his own moral rectitude, he was the sole individual investigating Trump’s complicity with Russian interference in our electoral process who could not be tarred with a partisan brush. With Comey gone, there is a real risk that the investigation will be in the hands of either squabbling Congressional committees led by Republicans more interested in investigating leaks or of an FBI led by a Trump appointed toady answering to Deputy A.G. Ron Rosenstein, who incinerated his reputation by drafting a letter detailing a rationale for Comey’s termination.
Republican reaction so far has been muted. They are “troubled” but are leaving the full-throated calls for an independent prosecutor to Democrats. Timorous pearl clutching will not cut it. Baseless assertions of partisan motive are dangerous distractions. Trump’s actions imperil our democracy more seriously than it has been since 1861. Any member of Congress willing to sit idly by while a gang of criminally corrupt authoritarians subvert the world’s oldest democracy is complicit. The Washington Post had it wrong. Democracy dies in broad f–king daylight.