Severed Heads
22nd May 2017
Victor Davis Hanson looks at Washington.
Far too many government officials never pay the price for their crimes and misdeeds: Clinton, Rice, Napolitano, Lerner … Comey is the exception.President Trump’s firing of James Comey revealed strange timing, herky-jerky methods, and bad political optics.Certainly, in the existential political war that Trump finds himself in, it would have been wiser, first, to have rallied his entire White House team and congressional leaders around the decision and established a shared narrative, to have been magnanimous to the departing James Comey, and to have had obtained private guarantees from a preselected successor that he or she would serve and be appointed within a day or two.But otherwise the firing was overdue.The head of the FBI (quite outside his purview as an investigatory official) announced in summer 2016 to the nation that he had decided not to seek an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then, again in the role of a presumed federal attorney, he seemed to reverse that judgment by reopening his investigation. Then he appeared to re-reverse that decision — all at the height of a heated presidential campaign.