‘Enough Was Enough’: How Festering Anger at Comey Ended in His Firing
WASHINGTON — The countdown to President Trump’s dismissal of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, began last weekend, which the president spent stewing over Mr. Comey’s testimony to Congress last week in which he provided a few new details about the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump, according to people close to the president, had been openly talking about firing Mr. Comey for at least a week. Despite the objections from some of his aides about the optics and the lack of an obvious successor, the grumbling evolved into a tentative plan as he angrily watched the Sunday news shows at his Bedminster, N.J., golf resort.
By Monday, capping off months of festering grievances, Mr. Trump told people around him that he wanted Mr. Comey gone, repeatedly questioning Mr. Comey’s fitness for the job and telling aides there was “something wrong” with him, several people familiar with the discussions said.
A White House spokesman on Wednesday offered a different account of how the decision was made to dismiss Mr. Comey. Justice Department officials on Monday urged Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Comey for “atrocities” committed during the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday. The president merely endorsed that decision, she said.
At the same time, Ms. Sanders conceded that Mr. Trump “had considered letting Director Comey go from the day he was inaugurated.” That statement was more consistent with the account given by people around the president, who portrayed Mr. Trump as having returned to Washington from New Jersey on Monday determined to act after months of growing frustration with the F.B.I. director.
At first, Mr. Trump, who is fond of vetting his decisions with a wide circle of staff members, advisers and friends, kept his thinking to a small circle, venting his anger to Vice President Mike Pence; the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II; and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who all told him they generally backed dismissing Mr. Comey.
Another early sounding board was Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s longtime director of security and now a member of the White House staff, who would later be tasked with delivering the manila envelope containing Mr. Comey’s letter of dismissal to F.B.I. Headquarters, an indication of just how personal the matter was to the president.
Two senior aides — the chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, who have both been critical of the F.B.I. — questioned whether the time was right to dismiss Mr. Comey, arguing that doing it later would reduce the backlash, according to two people familiar with their thinking.
But Mr. Trump was adamant, denouncing Mr. Comey’s conduct in both the Clinton and Russia investigations, and left aides on Monday with the impression that he planned to take action the next day.
Early Tuesday, he made his final decision, keeping many aides, including the president’s communications team and network of surrogates, in the dark until news of the firing leaked out late in the afternoon. About an hour before the news broke, an administration official involved in communications and strategic planning joked that the relatively news-free events of Monday and Tuesday represented the start of a much-needed weeklong respite from the staff’s nonstop work over the last few months.
Mr. Trump explained the firing by citing Mr. Comey’s handling of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server — a justification that was rich in irony, White House officials acknowledged, considering that as recently as two weeks ago, the president appeared at a rally where he was serenaded with chants of “Lock her up!”
On Wednesday, the president and his staff had widened their criticism of Mr. Comey’s conduct on the Clinton inquiry to include a wider denunciation of his performance. “He wasn’t doing a good job,” Mr. Trump said, before entering a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, early Wednesday. “Very simply, he was not doing a good job.”
Yet even in his letter to Mr. Comey, the president mentioned the Russia inquiry, writing that “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” And that reflected, White House aides said, what they conceded had been his obsession over the investigation Mr. Trump believes is threatening his larger agenda.
The hostility toward Mr. Comey in the West Wing in recent weeks was palpable, aides said, with advisers describing an almost ritualistic need to criticize the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation to assuage an anxious and angry president.
Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to Mr. Trump who has been under F.B.I. scrutiny as part of the bureau’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, was among those who urged the president to fire Mr. Comey, people briefed on the discussions said.
“There was a sense in the White House, I believe, that enough was enough when it came to this guy,” Mr. Stone said shortly after Mr. Comey’s dismissal became public on Tuesday.
It is not clear if Mr. Stone, who has told friends that he believes Mr. Comey was on a “witch hunt,” spoke with Mr. Trump directly on the matter and, if so, how recent the interactions were.
Mr. Trump denied in a Twitter post on Wednesday morning that he had spoken to Mr. Stone about the F.B.I. director, and Mr. Stone declined to describe his interactions with the president in an interview. But two longtime Trump associates with knowledge of the matter said the two had recently discussed their mutual dissatisfaction with Mr. Comey and his investigation.
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