THE COMEY MISFIRE

It was the mother of all bombshells, and Donald Trump dropped it late in the afternoon of May 9 on an unsuspecting Washington. In a manila envelope hand-delivered by his longtime aide, the rookie President informed FBI Director James Comey—whose agents are shoulder-deep in an investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign—that he was kaput. “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau,” Trump wrote. Comey, who was in Los Angeles on bureau business, learned of the firing on television. At first he thought it was a joke.

Not a joke—but probably a gross miscalculation by Trump, like reaching for a gasoline can in order to extinguish a grease fire. Over the past year, a growing number of observers, ranging from career Justice Department officials to politicians in both parties, had come to the conclusion that Comey’s fine-tuned sense of his own spotless integrity was a fire in desperate need of dousing. What one former colleague of Comey’s calls his “moral vanity” led him to insert himself repeatedly in last year’s election via improvised tramplings of standard department procedures. The director told Congress that he was “mildly nauseous” at finding himself mired in politics, but had to admit he would do it all exactly the same way if he were to live through it again.

But Comey wasn’t removed by some dispassionate board of inquiry. He was canned by a man whose campaign aides and at least one former National Security Adviser are under FBI investigation. Indeed, at almost the same