Posse Comeytatus

Comey is gone. You can find a million links to the story, so I won't bother. My thoughts:

• I was nine years old, almost 10, when the Saturday Night Massacre took place. It was actually on my brother's 7th birthday. By the time Nixon moved against Archibald Cox, there was ample evidence of criminal activity. At this point, there is no evidence of criminal activity at all, at least on behalf of the Trump administration, especially in terms of a coverup. As a result, comparing what happened today, right in the middle of the news cycle, with the cynical move that Nixon made on a Saturday night, when he hoped no one would pay attention, is asinine. It's simply not an apt comparison, especially since Trump's attorney general and his deputy were the ones who made the recommendation. Not analogous in the least.
• As far as the Democrats are concerned, Comey has been a hero and a goat and a hero and a goat and now, apparently, a hero, because he's been given the pipe. I don't think he's either, actually. He's a bureaucrat trying to survive, but he'd long overrun his headlights in a deep, deep wood. I'm pretty sure Obama would have given Comey the pipe, too, but he didn't feel like he could get by with it, because he thought it would jeopardize the Clinton campaign. As it turned out, Obama was protecting something that was doomed, anyway.
• The largest problem with Comey was his approach to his job -- he's an investigator, not a prosecutor, so his regular pronouncements about whether criminal charges were warranted in the Clinton email case were, to put it mildly, outrageous. I understand why Comey did speak up on the case initially -- Loretta Lynch was clearly in the bag for Clinton and the meeting she had with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in Phoenix was astonishingly improper. It was equally improper for Comey to render a judgment on whether charges were warranted. The right approach would have been to let Lynch kill the investigation, and then resign his position out of principle. That was what Elliot Richardson and William Ruckleshaus did in 1973. Comey apparently wasn't that principled. He tried to split the difference and it did not work.
• I see that John McCain, who still hates Trump, is now calling for an independent committee on the Russia business, while Chuck Schumer is calling for a special prosecutor. If I were Trump, I would name McCain the prosecutor and let him go full Captain Queeg on the deal. It would get McCain's butt out of the Senate and would allow the governor of Arizona to appoint a more coherent replacement in the Senate. If my suspicions are correct, Trump doesn't have anything to fear, because if Trump had done something untoward, we'd have found out about it a long time ago. Trump has very few friends in Washington, even in his own party, and there are probably thousands of people who would love to give him the shiv.
• My guess on what happens next? Trump will be okay. The more time Chuck Schumer spends in front of a microphone with his sonorous blathering, the better. If Trump is truly interested in clearing the decks, he ought to fire the odious IRS Commissioner John Koskinen next. He ought to then have Sessions turn loose some of his deputies to take a real look into what's been going on at the IRS for the last 8 years. I guarantee that if he did that, some bureaucrat would take his revenge on Trump by releasing his tax returns, which will actually help Trump. I think in about three months, it will become clear that the Trump administration began in earnest this day.