Trump calls Comey a 'grandstander' and a 'showboat'
One question dominates Washington in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump's abrupt sacking of Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey.
Is the 45th President presiding over a huge political cover-up on collusion between the Trump election campaign team and Russia, which would rival the 1970s Watergate scandal that brought down president Richard Nixon?
Elaine Kamarck, a public governance expert at the Brookings Institution's Center for Effective Public Management, says: "Either Donald Trump is guilty and desperate to throw investigators off the trail, or he has just committed a monumental blunder.
"If he's innocent he has made himself look guilty and by acting on impulse has shown his shallow knowledge of history, his lack of respect for the rule of law, and his monumental and ultimately self-destructive egotism.
"And if he's guilty? Well we know how this story ends," she adds, alluding to the Watergate break-in and bugging of Democratic offices by the Nixon administration.
Political debate and media coverage are dominated by the Russian interference controversy and Comey's sacking.
Trump has effectively put his presidency and the entire Republican agenda on the line.
There is no smoking gun that Trump himself collaborated with Russia, though at a minimum there is deep suspicion that some of his campaign associates had some underhand dealings.
Trump's potential motivations for sacking the controversial Comey are numerous.
On Friday Trump told NBC television that Comey was a "showboat" and grandstander".
"The FBI had been in turmoil," Trump said.
The six-foot, eight-inch Comey did haphazardly become far too high profile for an intelligence chief thanks to his public interventions into Hillary Clinton's state department email investigation last year and recent rebuttals of Trump's wild claims.
Upstage jibe
"He's become more famous than me," Trump joked when introducing Comey at a White House ceremony on January 22.
Trump, a former celebrity TV star, doesn't like to be upstaged.
Remarkably, it emerged via The New York Times that, in a one-on-one dinner with Comey a week into his presidency, Trump reputedly asked, inappropriately, the independent FBI director if he would be loyal to the President.
At the time, Trump was weighing whether to retain Comey as FBI boss.
Comey reportedly declined to make that pledge, responding that he would always be honest with Trump but that he was not "reliable" in the conventional political sense, according to the Times account.
Trump asserts that on three separate occasions Comey told him – after improperly Trump asked – that the President was not under investigation on Russia.
Even if Comey was a principled patriot, the top law enforcement official was not loved by Democrats or Republicans after his ungainly entries into the political fray over the past 10 months.
As the Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein noted in his letter to Trump recommending Comey be fired, there was near "universal" agreement the FBI boss made mistakes last year in his investigation into Clinton's use of a personal email account and server as secretary of state.
Indeed, Republicans and Democrats – often for opposite reasons – abhorred Comey's breaking of protocol to speak publicly in July on his decision to not recommend charges and his announcement 11 days before the November 8 election that the Clinton investigation had been reopened.
At the time Trump praised Comey for his "guts" and upon assuming office in January retained his services, in just his fourth year of a 10-year term.
Former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden suspects that as President, Trump grew wary of Comey as the FBI pressed the Russia investigation and in the knowledge of the Clinton email experience.
"Not because the President was suddenly seized with concern about how Clinton was handled, but perhaps out of fear that Comey could reprise his independent, attorney general-free performance this year as the Russia investigation advances," Hayden wrote for The Hill.
Comey critics argue the most appropriate time to sack him was at the start of the presidency, not nearly four months in when the FBI was probing Trump's associates and perhaps the President himself.
Uncertain rationale
The problem for Trump is that the rationale and timeline for instigating the dismissal keeps changing.
Vice-President Mike Pence and White House spokespeople initially said this week Trump acted on Rosenstein's recommendation and the President only made his decision on Tuesday when the Deputy Attorney-General's letter arrived.
The story gradually evolved: Trump had been considering firing Comey for weeks.
The explanation switched again on Thursday when Trump said he was going to fire Comey "regardless" of Rosenstein's advice.
In March, Comey publicly rejected Trump's wild claims that his predecessor Barack Obama wiretapped phones at Trump Tower.
He confirmed the bureau was probing potential ties between Trump's associates and Russia during the election.
Comey had previously refused a request from Trump's chief of staff Reince Priebus to knock down media reports of communications between Trump's associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the campaign.
Then last week Comey declined to publicly rule out that Trump was a target of the Russia investigation.
But what may have enraged Trump more is when Comey told a Senate judiciary committee that it made him feel "mildly nauseous" to think that disclosing an FBI investigation into Clinton's emails may have affected the US presidential election.
The thin-skinned Trump is aggrieved at suggestions his election win was not legitimate or was aided by the FBI or Russia. Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million people, but Trump won the state-by-state electoral college.
Defiant tweet
Trump tweeted last week: "FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! The phony...Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?"
Trump might have been aware the FBI was ramping up its probe into Russia and his campaign. Comey began receiving daily – instead of weekly – briefings on the probe, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The Senate intelligence committee has issued a subpoena for Trump's sacked national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was ousted for misleading about his interactions Moscow's ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
It took Trump nearly three weeks to fire Flynn, and only after Flynn's false statements were exposed by media.
Comey was fired by Trump a matter of hours after receiving the letter from Rosenstein. The unaware FBI chief was delivering a speech to staff in Los Angeles.
In a show of solidarity, some FBI agents changed their Facebook profile pictures to feature Comey.
Furthermore, Trump's now Attorney-General Jeff Sessions denied meeting any Russian officials during the election as a senator, but was later exposed by The Washington Post for meeting twice with Kislyak.
Sessions therefore promised to recuse himself from the Justice Department's involvement in the FBI's probe of Russia's interference in the election.
Yet there was Sessions' own letter and signature this week supporting his deputy Rosenstein's written recommendation to Trump to fire Comey, the man overseeing the Russia probe.
In further poor optics the day after Comey's firing, Kislyak on Wednesday was photographed by Kremlin state media smiling and shaking hands with Trump in the Oval Office in a visit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Probe persists
Trump has not fired the entire FBI and its Russia probe will persist.
Comey's acting replacement, Andrew McCabe, told the Senate intelligence committee on Thursday that the Russia investigation remains "highly significant", in contrast to the assertion by White House deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders that it is "one of the smallest things that [the FBI has] got going on their plate".
"Simply put, sir, you cannot stop the men and women of the FBI from doing the right thing, protecting the American people, and upholding the constitution," McCabe said.
Still, former Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta told American radio that the director of the FBI "is particularly important to just how aggressive an investigation will be".
Trump's appointment of a new FBI chief will be closely scrutinised, as Democrats threaten to block any nomination unless an independent special prosecutor – the equivalent of a royal commission – takes over the Russia meddling probe.
Legendary reporter Bob Woodward, who uncovered the Watergate scandal over 40 years ago, is cautious about leaping prematurely on the widespread comparisons between Trump's firing of Comey and president Nixon's "Saturday night massacre" of special prosecutor Archibald Cox in a bid to escape the Watergate humiliation.
"Let's see what the evidence is," Woodward told The Washington Post this week.
