Trump defends firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation director Comey

One famous special counsel was Patrick Fitzgerald, who investigated and prosecuted Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for his role in the public identification of Valerie Plame, a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer.

Schumer had told Trump in a phone call earlier that he thought dumping Comey was a mistake.

In firing Comey, Trump has strengthened the argument that a serious bipartisan congressional commission staffed with nonpartisan investigators needs to be created to get to the bottom of the Russian Federation stuff, and it needs to be populated and staffed by people Trump can’t make disappear with his famous catchphrase: “You’re fired”. The Hill reported back in October that Trump praised Comey for having “guts” to “make the move that he made in light of the kind of opposition he had”, regarding Clinton’s email probe.

The firing has drawn attention for its timing, as Comey was delving into possible ties between Trump campaign officials and Russian Federation.

Emboldened Democrats are turning up the volume on their calls for a special prosecutor.

The decision to fire Comey, “raises profound questions about whether the White House is brazenly interfering in a criminal matter”, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a statement.

Current and former United States intelligence officials have described Kislyak as a top spy and recruiter of spies, a notion that Russian officials have dismissed.

Sanders said there has been an “erosion” of confidence in Comey after a series of “missteps and mistakes” over the course of “the last several months, and frankly the past year”. But instead, Rosenstein cited Comey’s actions in June and July of past year – and rightly so – as a reason to replace the Federal Bureau of Investigation director with someone who respected the chain of command and Department of Justice protocols. Comey twice broke precedent with long-standing FBI practice and made public comments during a campaign about ongoing investigations; during the campaign and after, Trump and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions acclaimed Comey for it, the president literally embracing him.

Trump says that Republicans and Democrats will soon “be thanking me” for firing Comey. Comey’s firing does not necessarily mean the FBI’s investigation into Moscow’s role in the 2016 election will be disrupted or end, legal experts told Reuters.

Russian Federation has denied any such meddling.

Ex-FBI Director James Comey has taken action in an “inappropriate manner” many times in the past, not only when it came to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, Karl Rove said Wednesday.

Burr tweeted Wednesday that it would be a closed setting.

Was Sessions involved? “That’s something you should ask the Department of Justice”, Spicer said. Those contacts with Kislyak played a role in Flynn’s ultimate resignation from his job at the White House and in Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from overseeing the FBI’s Russian Federation investigation.

“He violated a clear red line in America that has existed since the founding which is we divide the investigative decision and activity from the prosecutorial decision”, he said.

When pressed on this, Spicer would put forth Rosenstein’s resume: A prosecutor with more than 30 years of experience who served as a U.S. Attorney during the Obama administration and was overwhelmingly confirmed for his new position as deputy attorney general by Congress.

However Burr reiterated questions about President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey. The Senate intelligence committee said it expects McCabe to appear at a hearing Thursday on current and projected national security threats. But the impact of removing an independent FBI director who was leading an investigation with potentially dire ramifications was not lost in the dramatic removal of the nation’s top law enforcement official.

The FBI director only needs to be confirmed by a simple majority in the Senate, so Giuliani would really only need to convince a couple of now-skeptical Republican senators that he’d be the right man for the job.