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‘Constitutional crisis’: Trump sacks FBI director

FBI director James Comey will testify in public and behind closed doors.

FBI director James Comey will testify in public and behind closed doors. Photo: Getty

Donald Trump has drawn comparisons to disgraced former President Richard Nixon and the infamous Watergate scandal after sensationally sacking FBI Director James Comey, the man who was leading a wide-ranging investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Mr Comey was reportedly blindsided by his axing, and initially thought the announcement was some kind of practical joke.

The New York Times reported that Mr Comey was addressing FBI staff in Los Angeles when the news flashed up on television screens in the background.

Mr Comey reportedly laughed at the news, “saying that he thought it was a fairly funny prank”, the Times reported.

However, the dismissal letter was received at FBI headquarters soon after.

In that letter, which has shocked both sides of US politics, Mr Trump said the firing was necessary to restore “public trust and confidence” in the FBI.

“You are not able to effectively lead” the FBI, the letter reads, adding the decision to dismiss the US’s top law-enforcement officer was based on a recommendation by US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions.

The letter intimated the decision was a result of Mr Comey’s handling of an election-year email scandal last year involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Mr Comey, appointed by former president Barack Obama, was just three years into a 10-year term due to expire in 2023.

Reaction in Washington was ferocious and bipartisan.

Democrats denounced the move, likening it to the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973 in which President Nixon fired an independent special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, told Mr Trump he was committing a mistake and labelled the firing a cover-up. Republicans also attacked the decision, saying publicly that it could be damaging for their party.

comey letter

The letter written by Donald Trump to FBI Director James Comey. Photo: EPA

‘Constitutional crisis’

“Today’s action by President Trump completely obliterates any semblance of an independent investigation into Russian efforts to influence our election, and places our nation on the verge of a constitutional crisis,” said Representative John Conyers, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Even Kim Beazley, Australia’s former ambassador to the US, said Mr Trump sacked Mr Comey to shut down the investigation into his campaign’s links with Russia.

“Certainly the inquiry the FBI is currently conducting into the relationship of Trump’s campaign team, maybe Trump himself, and the Russians, is such that it may have reached the point where somebody would want to be able to appoint an FBI director to suppress the investigation,” Mr Beazley said on Wednesday.

“That (investigation) carries the biggest threat of impeachment for Trump.”

President’s letter

In the letter, Mr Trump made no mention of Mr Comey’s role heading up the Clinton investigation, but asserted that the FBI boss informed him “on three separate occasions that I am not under investigation”.

“The President has accepted the recommendation of the Attorney General and the deputy Attorney General regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters.

White House officials denied allegations that there was any political motive in the move by Mr Trump.

The White House also said the search for a new FBI director was beginning immediately.

Justice Department officials say Mr Sessions held conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the US during the US election campaign and the Trump administration handover period.

Mr Sessions did not disclose the meetings when asked about possible contacts between members of Mr Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during his confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

Democratic law makers condemned Mr Comey’s sacking, describing it an effort to undermine the Russia probe and demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to carry it forward.

Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that Mr Trump “has catastrophically compromised the FBI’s ongoing investigation of his own White House’s ties to Russia”.

“Not since Watergate have our legal systems been so threatened, and our faith in the independence and integrity of those systems so shaken.”

News of the sacking came shortly after the FBI corrected a sentence in Mr Comey’s sworn testimony to a Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

Mr Comey told lawmakers that Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs Clinton, had sent “hundreds and thousands” of emails to her husband’s laptop, including some with classified information.

On Tuesday, the FBI said in a two-page letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that only “a small number” of the thousands of emails found on the laptop had been forwarded there while most had simply been backed up from electronic devices.

Most of the email chains on the laptop containing classified information were not the result of forwarding, the FBI said.

Mr Comey told the Judiciary Committee last week it would have been “catastrophic” to conceal his decision to reopen an investigation into Mrs Clinton’s emails just 11 days before the 2016 presidential election.

He said it made him “nauseous” to think that his announcement on October 28 may have affected the election’s outcome.

Mrs Clinton earlier said her election bid was derailed by Mr Comey’s letter to Congress about the probe of her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and by the WikiLeaks release of her campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, allegedly stolen by Russian hackers.

Praised for his independence and integrity, Mr Comey has spent three decades in law enforcement and has been no stranger to controversy.

Before the past months’ controversies, Mr Comey was perhaps best known for a remarkable 2004 standoff with top officials in the George W. Bush administration over a federal domestic surveillance program.

– with agencies

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