PROPERLY FIRED, BUT FOR THE WRONG REASON:

The most damning revelations in the published accounts of the memoir, however, are not Comey's condemnations of Trump, but his disclosures of his own thinking when he made the decisions that helped put the current president in office.

In July of 2016, Comey held a press conference excoriating Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified information, but announcing his decision to decline to prosecute her, said her actions were careless but inadvertent. Then, on October 28, 2016, days before the presidential election, Comey wrote a letter to Congress announcing publicly that the case was being reopened, a decision that experts have argued likely cost Clinton the election. At the same time that Comey was publicly discussing a federal investigation of Clinton, the FBI was investigating whether Trump's campaign was aiding a Russian influence operation aimed at putting the real-estate mogul in office. Comey kept the latter secret. The investigation into Clinton found nothing new--the inquiry into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia is ongoing and has already led to  guilty pleas from several former Trump campaign officials.

Why did Comey make that decision? His book, A Higher Loyalty, will be released on Tuesday. But accounts of its contents and excerpts published by outlets that have obtained copies of the book make clear that he concedes that he believed Clinton was going to win. "It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president," Comey wrote, "my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don't know."

This is an astonishing admission. Justice Department guidelines bar officials from making important disclosures related to investigations close to elections to avoid influencing them. Comey took it upon himself to decide that, based on his concern that keeping the news confidential could call the legitimacy of a Clinton presidency into question, he had to announce that the investigation was being restarted. But that was not his decision to make; the role of the FBI is to investigate crimes, it is not to use its authority to protect or harm the legitimacy of a given politician. A hypothetical Clinton administration's legitimacy should not have been a factor in Comey's decision whatsoever; Comey should only have been concerned with following the Justice Department's guidelines, which exist to protect the integrity of the democratic process, and which Comey followed in the case of the Republican candidate. [...]

Trump fired Comey for self-interested reasons, an act that may amount to obstruction of justice. But by that point, Comey had proven himself unfit to hold his office.

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