What a time to be alive!
If there’s anything to like about Trump and his presidency – whether as an American or not – it is the sheer amount of history the old chap is making by just being the guy that he is. In fact, as a non- American, it often gets amusing to follow his daily acts as President of the “free world”
Amusing is the exact word that describes how Trump has handled the firing of FBI Director, James Comey. From the fact that the former Director learnt about his own dismissal on TV down to the fact that Trump cannot just win even though his harshest critics (the Democrats) won’t speak in Comey’s defence.
The possible ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia is another factor that injects humour into the mix. Donald Trump has been trying hard to steadily walk on the slimy fact that Comey’s dismissal, at the time it came, may dampen the separate investigations ongoing into possible ties between his campaign and the Russian government in such a manner that may have affected the November 2016 elections that brought him into power. The reason this article is necessary at all is that Trump has been failing woefully since Tuesday at that task.
Comey was at the centre of said investigation and naturally, Trump firing him with the particular timing raised eyebrows. Is he trying to frustrate the investigations? Will he pick a Director as Comey’s replacement that won’t be as thorough on the Russia-Trump ties investigations? All valid questions. All questions that Trump and his whole team have failed at getting straightforward answers to even though it’s only been a few days.
On the 9th of May, Trump’s letter dismissing Comey was published online and to some extent, it may have helped his cause of proving that it had nothing to now with his own investigations. That’s if you overlook the fact that he made allsions to being investigated in his own letter.
The letters of recommendation that the President of America mentioned in the first paragraph have also been published and hey show nothing other than Rod Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions believe that Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal before and after the elections was so faulty that his continued leadership of the F.B.I was going to threaten the very foundations of the Bureau.
So what dd Trump mean when he added the second paragraph talking about appreciating Comey assuring him that he wasn’t under investigation – a fact that makes no sense in light of the fact that both Congressional investigations as well as the F.B.I investigations into the Trump campaign involvement with Russia have always been public knowledge.
Trump, however, is not one to limit his contradiction of himself to one platform. Like the unprecedented ball of confusion that he is, Trump granted an interview to NBC’s Lester Holt days after in he West Wing of the White House where he “scattered the whole thing” as we’ll say here in Nigeria.
Here’s a transcript of that part of the interview:
LESTER HOLT (HOST): Monday you met with the deputy attorney general Ron Rosenstein.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Right.
HOLT: Did you ask for a recommendation?
TRUMP: What I did is I was going to fire Comey. My decision. It was not —(he could have stopped here but no! He’s Trump after all)
HOLT: You had made the decision before they came in the room?
TRUMP: I was going to fire Comey. There’s no good time to do it, by the way. They —
HOLT: Because in your letter you said I have accepted their recommendations. SO you had already made the decision?
TRUMP: I was going to fire regardless of recommendation. [GBAAM!] He [Rosenstein] made a recommendation. He’s highly respected. Very good guy. Very smart guy. The Democrats like him. The Republicans like him. He made a recommendation, but regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.
So you tell us: Did Trump fire Comey based on recommendations from the Attorneys-General that Comey had mishandled the Hillary e-mail scandal or did he do (as he apparently was going to the whole time) based on the fact that he was mad Comey (may or may not have) told him he wasn’t being investigated per Russian ties while he was actually being investigated?
We need a Trump confused emoji at this point!
