Major New Reports Detail How ‘Angry’ Trump Lost Patience With Comey
Three major new reports from leading newspapers are all shedding light on President Donald Trump‘s shocking move to fire FBI Director James Comey.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post all posted in-depth reports on the Comey firing Wednesday night — with the three stories offering a number of previously unreported details.
All three reports, to varying degrees, portray Trump as “angry” (a word used in the Post article) with Comey. The Times and the Post say Trump’s frustration bubbled over during his weekend stay at his golf course in Bedminster, NJ.
The Times reports that Comey did have one unlikely supporter as Trump’s closest advisors debated Comey’s fate: Steve Bannon. According to the piece, Bannon “questioned whether the time was right to dismiss Mr. Comey, arguing that doing it later would lessen the backlash, and urged him to delay, according to two people familiar with his thinking.”
Also, the animus was apparently mutual between the president and Comey, according to the Times.
“The president, Mr. Comey told associates, was ‘outside the realm of normal,’ even ‘crazy.'” the Times report said.
Meanwhile, the Journal reports that the quick process that led to Comey’s dismissal even confounded people close to President Trump.
“The abruptness of this tells me that there must be something else here,” the Trump confidant told the Journal. “Everybody is wondering what happened.”
And the Washington Post zeroed in on the communications breakdown in the hours after the news was made public. The report says that Trump was furious with how it all played out as he was watching on cable news and saw “nobody was defending him.”
“This is probably the most egregious example of press and communications incompetence since we’ve been here,” a White House official told the Post. “It was an absolute disaster. And the president watched it unfold firsthand. He could see it.”
And it also appears that some officials disputed what the president said in his letter to Comey informing him of his decision yesterday:
In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate.
The Times took note of what people in the White House had to say about that very statement:
Yet even in his letter to Mr. Comey, the president mentioned the Russia inquiry, writing that “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” And that reflected, White House aides said, what they conceded had been his obsession over the investigation Mr. Trump believes is threatening his larger agenda.
And, rather ominously, one anonymous intelligence official told the Post that because Trump had “essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” there may be “a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.”
[image via screengrab]
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