WASHINGTON — In firing FBI Director James B. Comey, President Donald Trump may have hoped to bring the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election under control. Instead, as reaction in Washington spread on Wednesday, the move seemed to carry a large risk of making his troubles worse.
Trump has both privately and publicly seethed for weeks about the investigation into whether anyone connected with his campaign had cooperated with Russian efforts to influence the election.
He was angered further last week that Comey would not publicly back his claim that no evidence of collusion exists.
“The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax” and a “taxpayer funded charade,” he tweeted on Monday, the day White House officials now say he first discussed firing Comey with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
But if the goal was to get the investigation over with, firing Comey likely moved matters in the wrong direction, according to both Republican and Democratic former White House officials.
“In the short term it certainly fans the flames,” said Ed Rogers, a longtime Republican strategist and aide to former Republican presidents.
In an email lament circulated among prominent Republicans, A.B. Culvahouse Jr., former Reagan White House counsel and head of Trump’s vice presidential search effort, said the firing “both prolongs the FBI/DOJ investigation and undermines the credibility of the Trump campaign’s denials of no conspiracy with Putin.”
“We could be talking about Russian hacking in the midterms at this rate,” he wrote.
Susan Hennessey, an expert in national security law at the Brookings Institution who has been closely tracking the Russia investigation, said Trump appears to have lost sight of what would have been the best-case ending to the public investigation — clearing those who are innocent and allowing the White House to move forward.
“It’s apparent to everyone except perhaps the president that this story is not just going to go away,” she said. Although high-profile investigations can be costly to an administration, they’re often the only way to “dispense with the matter publicly” and “provide the level of certainty that the American people need.”
Comey, with his long service under presidents of both parties and his wide support among rank-and-file FBI agents, could have provided credible closure at the end of an investigation, especially if the probe were to clear most White House officials.
That’s why Hennessey and others predicted that eventually, despite current resistance, the administration will probably have to accept some form of special counsel or independent investigative commission.
Demands for a special prosecutor of some form likely will play a major role in Senate hearings over a nominee to replace Comey.
So far, the administration has staunchly resisted that idea, and it has kept the backing of the people it needs most, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
“Today we’ll no doubt hear calls for a new investigation,” McConnell said in a Senate speech Wednesday morning. That “can only serve to impede the current work being done,” he said.