Of all the instant reactions and hot takes on President Trump’s decision to fire his FBI director, few seemed as blunt as Jeffrey Toobin’s.
“It’s a grotesque abuse of power by the president of the United States,” Toobin told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
His colleague at the New Yorker, John Cassidy, wrote that Trump had “acted like a despot” and mounted a “terrifying attack on the American system of government” in an article headlined “Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey is an attack on American Democracy.”
“It amounts to a premeditated and terrifying attack on the American system of government” and possibly “will usher in a constitutional crisis.”
The national security blog Lawfare called it a “nightmare scenario.”
It was “a horrifying breach of every expectation we have of the relationship between the White House and federal law enforcement,” wrote the generally cerebral Ben Wittes and Susan Hennessey.
“….The immediate concern is to ensure that the integrity of the Russia investigation, and all associated investigations, is preserved. We have not previously called for a special prosecutor, believing that [Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein was a person of integrity who should be given a chance to make a call on that question. His performance today, however, requires that he now step aside.”
And David Frum, an editor at the Atlantic and a former George W. Bush speechwriter, asked: “Who can sincerely believe that President Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey for any reason other than to thwart an investigation of serious crimes?”
If anything, the remarks seemed to signal that, with the firing of Comey, even Trump’s more moderate critics had given up any semblance of restraint.
“This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies,” said Toobin, “that when there is an investigation that reaches near the president of the United States or the leader of a non-democracy, they fire the people who are in charge of the investigation.”
Toobin went on to say that “if anyone thinks that a new FBI director is going to come in and the agency will just take over and continue their investigation as if this had never happened, that’s not how it works. They will put in a stooge who will shut down this investigation.” He specifically mentioned New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Administration officials said Tuesday that Comey was fired because he had publicly discussed the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. The move violated Justice Department principles and procedures for handling investigations and had damaged the FBI’s credibility, officials said.
Toobin dismissed the administration’s explanation for Comey’s dismissal as “a lie.”
“It is not possibly true,” he said. “They wanted to fire him now, when he is investigating the White House. I mean, sometimes the most obvious explanation is the correct one.”
CNN tends to give their paid commentators considerable leeway to opine about the day’s news. But for Toobin, a former federal prosecutor who has written about some of the biggest court cases of the past 20 years, the remarks carried an unusual degree of certitude.
They also appeared to channel much of the anger and anxiety — particularly from the left — over Comey’s firing and the progress of the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election. At one point, Toobin even used a phrase that has become something of a mantra for critics of the Trump administration: “This is not normal.”
Twitter took notice. The commentary went viral almost instantly, becoming a Twitter “moment” before the end of the night. “I think @JeffreyToobin was all of us tonight,” MSNBC analyst Joy-Ann Reid wrote.
Not everyone was so impressed. The right-leaning website NewBusters criticized Toobin as “over the top,” saying “all of his pontificating was mere speculation.”
Conservative syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post was incredulous about Comey’s dismissal as well. “To fire him summarily with no warning because of something that happened in July is almost inexplicable,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
In his interview with Blitzer, Toobin offered his historical perspective on Trump’s decision. Like many others, he compared the situation to President Richard Nixon’s dismissal of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was leading the investigation of the Watergate scandal.
When Nixon ordered Cox fired in October 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned in protest, refusing to carry out the directive. Cox was eventually fired by Robert Bork, the solicitor general, and Nixon went on to abolish the special prosecutor’s office entirely. The events became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” widely viewed as one of the most sordid moments in White House history.
“That firing led indirectly but certainly to the resignation of President Nixon, and this is very much in this tradition,” Toobin said, while acknowledging that firing an FBI director is well within a president’s powers. “This is not normal. This is not politics as usual.”
October 20, 1973
— Jeffrey Toobin (@JeffreyToobin) May 9, 2017
May 9, 2017. The Tuesday Night Massacre.
— Jeffrey Toobin (@JeffreyToobin) May 10, 2017
Toobin’s assessment of the Saturday Night Massacre is shared by Ken Gormley, author of a 1997 biography of Cox, who described the decision to sack the special prosecutor as miscalculation that doomed Nixon’s presidency.
“The Saturday night massacre,” Gormley wrote, “was the single event in his long and controversial political life from which Richard M. Nixon, president of the most powerful nation in the world, would never recover.”
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