Trump and Comey: An Escalating Conflict With No Off-Ramp
The yearslong face-off between Donald Trump and James Comey amounts to a case study of how the president grew evermore emboldened to carry out his revenge agenda.
nytimes.com
It was not, to say the least, a great start to their relationship. James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, arrived at Trump Tower two weeks before Donald J. Trump would be inaugurated in 2017. On the agenda was a briefing for the incoming president by Mr. Comey and the intelligence community chiefs on their finding that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to hurt Hillary Clinton.
But Mr. Comey also planned to give the president-elect some even more awkward news.
It was the first time they had met, and Mr. Comey’s message — that there was a document circulating in Washington full of salacious claims related to Mr. Trump and Russia — left Mr. Trump suspecting that the F.B.I. director was implicitly threatening him. Mr. Comey later said he believed he had no choice but to share the information, despite the possibility that Mr. Trump would take it as a demonstration of leverage over him.
Even before that first fraught encounter, their fates had been entangled by Mr. Comey’s decision in the campaign’s closing days to publicly reopen an inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server, a choice that Democrats assailed and blamed for her defeat. And after the Trump Tower meeting, the two men would be set on a path of escalating conflict and mutual loathing that led last week to a prosecutor handpicked for the task by Mr. Trump securing an indictment of Mr. Comey.
It is a well-documented clash of two supremely self-confident figures now tied together in American history: Mr. Trump, intent on retribution and willing to roll over democratic norms of justice to do so, and Mr. Comey, the professed straight shooter whose judgment on politically explosive cases gave ammunition to detractors on both sides of the aisle. Neither man ever sought an off-ramp.
Seen in light of Mr. Trump’s finally securing an indictment against someone he perceives as a political enemy — the first time he has done so — their well-documented, yearslong face-off amounts to a case study of how Mr. Trump, far from moving on as he won political and legal victories, grew ever more emboldened to direct the Justice Department to carry out his revenge agenda.
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