#James Comey was, according to sources, flabbergasted when President Trump had accused Barack Obama of wiretapping him. Comey had told his aides and associates that the claim was "outside the realm of normal" and even went so far as describing it as crazy.
When Comey scorned the President's #wiretapping claim, Trump was absolutely furious. He became even more enraged in the following weeks and started to talk about firing Comey, according to sources. An easily angered man with a burning temperament, the sources that gave this account to the New York Times painted a picture of a President who can be hostile, obsessed with loyalty and easily enraged by those who doubt his own point of view.
And so the scene was well and truly set for a showdown between #James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence, and Donald J Trump, the President of the United States of America.
The culmination of a long disagreement
Last week when President Trump watched some Sunday talk shows at his golf resort, he made the decision that the time to #fire Comey had come. Indeed, the President thought that there was “something wrong with” the FBI director, this according to sources who spoke to the New York Times. On his own part, Trump decided that Comey could not be trusted just as the bureau was furthering their investigations into Russia's links to Trump's campaign in 2016, an area of great concern for both Democrats and Republicans alike.
Comey's firing on Tuesday was the culmination of a long build-up of tension and, even though it seemed to come out of nowhere, according to aides, Trump had built up to it for months. #Comey wasn't even formally let go, according to sources who report that he was talking to the FBI staff in Los Angeles when he saw his own firing being reported on the television news.
#President Trump has a well-known obsession with loyalty whilst Comey is known to be an independent rebel who has spoken out against, amongst others, the George W Bush administration in the early 2000s, an event and stance that made his reputation and thus his career.
And yet… #Comey, a trusted lawmaker who is concerned with impartiality and independence, saw Donald Trump as a wild and wily loose cannon who went on Twitter rampages and endangered the bureau’s credibility in the eyes of America.
For its own part, #the White House had twisted and turned through a series of ever-changing and contrary accounts of the matter: the Oval Office first claimed that Trump had given the order to fire Comey as a result of the attorney general recommending it. By Wednesday this week, the #Oval Office had altered their account of the matter and said that the President had pondered getting rid of Comey even as far back as November, once he had scored his surprise and world-changing victory in the election; and then yet again they gave another account a few days later – the President decided to pursue his course of action once Comey testified before Congress last week.
In a message that seemed crafted for public consumption, on Wednesday #Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, said that Trump had fired Comey due to the “atrocities” committed by Comey during the October 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email use, a matter that sadly swayed the public opinion's decision against her and saw the vote going to Trump.
But quietly off the record, aides recollected that Trump has been stewing with a growing list of grievances against Comey, one of which was his handling of the #Russia investigation, as well as his disinclination to follow anti-Trump leaks. And then of course the wiretapping fiasco was also a constant burden for the President to carry.
