Opinion | The White House’s laughable spin about Comey now lies in smoking ruins

The turmoil surrounding former FBI Director James Comey and President Trump started long before Comey was fired on May 9. (Video: Jenny Starrs, Julio Negron/The Washington Post)

THE MORNING PLUM:

For all the talk about the unusual nature of President Trump’s decision to fire James Comey, it actually fits comfortably into a well-established pattern that has defined this presidency from its very first day. Trump makes an emotional, impulsive assertion or decision — and then his underlings are forced into a wild scramble to produce a rationale or justification for it.

In this pattern, the decision or assertion often originated in the same place — deep in the recesses of Trump’s entangled megalomania and sneaking dread of the illegitimacy of his presidency. And the Comey firing, it turns out, may not be an exception to this.

This conclusion is bolstered by some great new reporting this morning on the Trumpian thought processes (if you can call them that) leading to the firing of the FBI director. The reporting reduces the White House’s original spin on the firing — that Trump decided to fire Comey after Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, presented a case rooted in his handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails — to a pile of smoking rubble.

The New York Times relays this striking account of what really happened:

In private, aides said, Mr. Trump has been nursing a collection of festering grievances, including Mr. Comey’s handling of the Russia investigation, his seeming lack of interest in pursuing anti-Trump leaks and the perceived disloyalty over the wiretapping claim.

Mr. Comey’s fate was sealed by his latest testimony about the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election and the Clinton email inquiry. Mr. Trump burned as he watched, convinced that Mr. Comey was grandstanding. He was particularly irked when Mr. Comey said he was “mildly nauseous” to think that his handling of the email case had influenced the election, which Mr. Trump took to demean his own role in history.

The Post’s account offers similar details. It notes that Trump had grown “increasingly agitated” by Comey’s public comments about the Russia probe and “was infuriated by what he viewed as the director’s lack of action in recent weeks on leaks from within the federal government.” Trump decided to fire Comey by last weekend. Then this happened:

First, though, he wanted to talk with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his trusted confidant, and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly. Trump summoned the two of them to the White House for a meeting, according to a person close to the White House.
The president already had decided to fire Comey, according to this person. But in the meeting, several White House officials said Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey.

The accounts differ somewhat, probably because different sources picked up different hints of Trump’s pathologies depending on the moment, but it’s perfectly feasible that all of it is true. In both, Trump was angry because Comey was in some manner or other not cooperating with his preferred story line. Comey is either failing to make the Russia probe go away, by not sufficiently playing it down or by not doing enough to combat leaks about it. Or he’s failing to do enough to prop up Trump’s efforts to distract from it with what we might call alternative narratives.

And in both, the chronology is clear — the decision to fire Comey was made before the bogus justification for it was produced. Indeed, The Post reports that Rosenstein — who wrote the memo outlining that justification — reportedly threatened to quit when White House leaks spun a damage-control narrative in which Trump only acted on his recommendation. As the Times aptly puts it, the White House justifications for the firing have now been revealed as “shifting and contradictory.”

The common thread here is the constant need to return to the meaning of the election. The Comey letter to Congress about Clinton’s newly discovered emails is widely believed to have helped Trump win; Comey tacitly conceded that this might be true. The Russia probe continues to feed the sense that a foreign power helped tip the election to him; Comey won’t make it disappear. And, of course, there are lingering questions around the fact that Trump fired Comey right after he asked for more resources to prosecute that investigation, which of course would only further feed the sense that the Russian intervention mattered to the outcome.

This has happened again and again, beginning literally on Day One of the Trump presidency. Trump was enraged by the media’s accurate reporting of his relatively small inaugural crowd size, which immediately broadcast with terrifying vividness that he lacked popular support. So administration officials had to scramble to find photographic “evidence” that he was right, while others attacked the media for allegedly obscuring the truth. Trump also falsely claimed based on conservative media that President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones, to suggest that he, too, had been targeted by illicit efforts to undermine him during the election. That forced the White House counsel to go hunting for “evidence” of this, and when that failed, the White House called on Congress to investigate it (i.e., pretend it was real).

Still more: In the face of his loss of the popular vote by nearly 3 million, Trump claimed that he would have won, if millions of people hadn’t voted illegally. This required top officials to go around promising a commission to investigate the phantom “voter fraud” problem — in other words, to prove Trump right. And now that commission is actually going to happen. But that brings us to our next item.

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* HERE COMES TRUMP’S ‘VOTER FRAUD’ INVESTIGATION: ABC News scoops that Trump is set to sign an executive order establishing a commission to investigate nonexistent voter fraud:

The commission, which will include Republicans and Democrats, will be tasked with studying “vulnerabilities” in U.S. voting systems and potential effects on “improper voting, fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting,” according to one official with knowledge of the announcement … The commission’s review … will not just address Trump’s allegations about the 2016 election but also “systemic issues that have been raised over many years in terms of the integrity of the elections,” one official said.

The commission will look at voter suppression, to placate Democrats, and there is also the possibility of a look at other systemic problems. But the emphasis on voter fraud is terrible — it will likely lay the groundwork for more voter suppression efforts.

* REPUBLICANS BOTCH DEFENSE OF HEALTH BILL: Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports on how a bunch of House Republicans have responded to town hall crowds angry about the passage of their monstrous health bill, and summarizes:

The result has been a messaging mess … Republicans have struggled to explain the plan they just approved. Lawmakers are telling audiences conflicting things about how the bill would affect consumers. Others slammed a process they actively participated in or admitted they hadn’t read the entire bill before voting on it.

If you rushed the vote precisely so that people would not know your bill guts protections for preexisting conditions and hundreds of billions in health spending for the poor, while giving the rich a huge tax cut, it’s hard to explain later.

* LEFT PUSHES DEMOCRATS TO GET TOUGHER OVER RUSSIA: The grass-roots group CREDO Action has launched a new petition calling on Democrats to do everything possible to grind the Senate to a halt until a special prosecutor is appointed on the Russia probe. It demands:

“Refuse to proceed with all regular Senate business until the Department of Justice appoints a special prosecutor to investigate Trump and Russia and Trump’s outrageous abuse of power in firing FBI Director James Comey.”

It’s a sign that the left will insist on maximal opposition tactics from Democrats. Meanwhile, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee has launched a new guide for activists to use innovative theatrical tactics for pressuring Republican House members.

* HOUSE RATINGS CHANGES FAVOR DEMOCRATS: Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball forecasting website has just shifted its ratings of 18 House races, all in the direction of improving Democratic chances. Virtually all the Republicans in those districts voted for the GOP health bill.

Overall, Crystal Ball estimates that 10 GOP-held seats are Toss Ups, while another nine are Lean Republican, for a total of 19 that seem genuinely vulnerable to Democratic pickups. More than two dozen more are Likely Republican, but the political environment would have to keep deteriorating for them to become within reach.

* MCCONNELL WILL REGRET HIS EMBRACE OF TRUMP’S ABSURDITIES: E.J. Dionne Jr. takes stock of the rank absurdity of Trump’s explanation for the Comey firing and asks whether Mitch McConnell will ever regret tying himself to it:

Someday, McConnell will wish that he sounded more like Flake, Burr, Sasse and similarly minded Republicans. They all are aware of how absurd it is for Trump to pretend that a concern over Comey’s behavior in the Hillary Clinton email investigation — the very behavior the president once praised as demonstrating Comey’s “guts” — is the actual reason for the firing … Maybe McConnell figures he can reposition himself regarding Trump at the right time. But he missed his chance to stand up when it mattered.

True, but he might also be able to protect Trump for long enough to get him to sign deep tax cuts for the rich and the shredding of lots of regulations and the safety net, so it might be all good.

* GOP ADS BLUDGEON GEORGIA DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that outside GOP groups are spending big bucks on ads against Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate for the House special election in Georgia, and they’re all about Nancy Pelosi:

At least a half-dozen attack ads so far have tied Ossoff to the House Minority Leader … The Congressional Leadership Fund debuted a TV ad Tuesday featuring folks dressed up as hipsters and hippies praising Ossoff as “one of us.” … “We already have Nancy Pelosi as our Congresswoman,” says one, “now you’re going to give us Jon Ossoff as our Congressman.”

Meanwhile, Ossoff is set to respond with more than $6 million in ads of his own. But seriously — hippies? Are suburban Atlanta voters really worried about hippies?