Why do you think Trump gave Russian reporters access but not American reporters?

[CageTheBengal]

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Quote:WASHINGTON — President Trump’s abrupt dismissal of the F.B.I. director roiled Washington on Wednesday and deepened the sense of crisis swirling around the White House. Republican leaders came to the president’s defense, and Mr. Trump lashed out at Democrats and other critics, calling them hypocrites.

On Capitol Hill, at least a half-dozen Republicans broke with their leadership to express concern or dismay about the firing of James B. Comey, who was four years into a decade-long appointment as the bureau’s director. Still, they stopped well short of joining Democrats’ call for a special prosecutor to lead the continuing investigation of Russian contacts with Mr. Trump’s aides.

At the White House, Mr. Trump shrugged off accusations of presidential interference in a counterintelligence investigation. He hosted a surreal and awkwardly timed meeting in the Oval Office with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Mr. Kislyak’s private meetings with Mr. Trump’s aides are a key part of the sprawling investigation.

White House officials denied American reporters permission to witness the Oval Office meeting or take photographs, but Russian state news outlets published images taken by their official photographer of a beaming Mr. Trump shaking hands with the envoys. The pictures quickly spread on Twitter.

Stunned by the sudden loss of their leader, agents at the F.B.I. struggled throughout the day to absorb the meaning of Mr. Comey’s dismissal, which the White House announced Tuesday evening. Veteran agents and other F.B.I. employees described a dark mood throughout the bureau, where morale was already low from months of being pummeled over dueling investigations surrounding the 2016 presidential election.

Mr. Trump is weighing going to the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington on Friday as a show of his commitment to the bureau, an official said, though he is not expected to discuss the Russia investigation.

The president and his allies expressed no regrets over Mr. Comey’s removal, insisting that F.B.I. agents had been clamoring for it. Mr. Trump’s decision, they said, was unrelated to Mr. Comey’s oversight of the investigation into Russian meddling and possible connections to Trump advisers.

In an email to F.B.I. agents on Wednesday, Mr. Comey said he would not dwell on the reasons for his firing or how it was carried out.

“I have long believed that a president can fire an F.B.I. director for any reason, or for no reason at all,” he wrote in the email, which a law enforcement official read to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity.
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“I have said to you before that, in times of turbulence, the American people should see the F.B.I. as a rock of competence, honesty and independence,” Mr. Comey wrote. He added, “It is very hard to leave a group of people who are committed only to doing the right thing.”

Top Justice Department officials were hurrying to install an interim director to run the F.B.I. while a permanent replacement for Mr. Comey is chosen. Among those under consideration for the temporary role were several career law enforcement officials, including Andrew G. McCabe, who was named acting director upon Mr. Comey’s firing.

White House officials refused to comment on reports that, days before he was fired, Mr. Comey had asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in resources for the Russia investigation. Democrats cited the news of Mr. Comey’s request as added reason to be suspicious about the president’s motive for firing him.

“Was this really about something else?” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, asked in remarks on the Senate floor.

“Nothing less is at stake than the American people’s faith in our criminal justice system and the integrity of the executive branch of our government,” he said.

The outrage over Mr. Comey’s firing was a political turnabout for many Democrats, who had previously expressed anger and frustration at his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. It was that investigation that Mr. Trump cited as the reason for dismissing Mr. Comey.


After President Trump fired James B. Comey, politicians on both sides of the aisle changed their attitudes toward the ousted F.B.I. director. By SHANE O’NEILL and MARK SCHEFFLER on Publish Date May 10, 2017. Photo by Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »

Days before last fall’s election, Mr. Comey announced that the F.B.I. was examining newly found emails potentially related to the investigation. “I do not have confidence in him any longer,” Mr. Schumer said at the time.

“I am asking that he step down,” Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, said.

Many Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton, have since placed much of the blame for her loss on Mr. Comey’s actions.

On Wednesday, in a series of visceral posts on Twitter, Mr. Trump seized on those earlier comments to highlight Mr. Comey’s “scandals.” He also suggested that Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, be investigated, moments after Mr. Blumenthal appeared on television to condemn the president’s action.
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“Watching Senator Richard Blumenthal speak of Comey is a joke,” Mr. Trump wrote. “‘Richie’ devised one of the greatest military frauds in U.S. history.”

For years, “as a pol in Connecticut, Blumenthal would talk of his great bravery and conquests in Vietnam — except he was never there,” Mr. Trump added. When “caught, he cried like a baby and begged for forgiveness … and now he is judge & jury. He should be the one who is investigated for his acts.”

The president was referring to a 2010 article in The Times that said Mr. Blumenthal had presented himself as a Vietnam veteran during his first Senate campaign, when he had actually served in the Marine Reserves at home and never gone to war. The story did not say that Mr. Blumenthal had boasted of bravery or conquests.

Republican leaders echoed Mr. Trump’s Twitter attacks on Democrats throughout the day. At one point, the president wrote that his adversaries were pretending to be aggrieved by Mr. Comey’s firing.

“Phony hypocrites!” Mr. Trump wrote, signaling the growing frustration inside the White House about the backlash.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky — who, as majority leader, wields vast power over the focus of the Senate — defended the decision. Many other top Republicans agreed.

Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, stopped short of directly criticizing the president. But his committee announced that it had issued its first subpoena to demand records from Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, in connection with his emails, phone calls, meetings and financial dealings with Russians. It was an aggressive new tack for what had been a slow-moving inquiry.

The maelstrom is sure to sap the Senate’s time and energy, detracting from a Republican agenda that includes a budget, health care, a tax overhaul and infrastructure.

“Today, we’ll no doubt hear calls for a new investigation,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor as most Democrats looked on. He predicted that such a move could “only serve to impede the current work being done.”


In the House, the Republican chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to review Mr. Comey’s firing. The chairman, Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, said the review would be included in an internal Justice Department inquiry into the F.B.I.’s disclosure of its investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails before the election.

Despite their concerns about Mr. Comey’s actions last year, Democrats said his dismissal evoked the days of President Richard M. Nixon, who ordered the firing of the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate case. They called for the appointment of a special counsel to lead the Russia inquiry.

Democrats exerted as much pressure as they could on their Republican colleagues on Wednesday, using procedural moves available to the minority to block or delay hearings on Russia, cybersecurity, presidential nominees and several other matters.

When Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, asked for unanimous consent to permit a scheduled meeting of the Special Committee on Aging, Mr. Schumer objected. Ms. Collins, clearly angry, said: “This makes no sense whatsoever. This is an example of the dysfunction of the Senate.”

For months, Republican lawmakers have been left to defend, sometimes haltingly, presidential behavior they often strain to understand or support. But even some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal defenders questioned the timing of the firing.

“It surely would have been simpler and cleaner to do so in January,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who defended Mr. Comey’s removal nonetheless.

White House officials said that Mr. Trump had been considering firing Mr. Comey since the day he was elected president.

But though Mr. Trump had lost confidence in Mr. Comey, the Justice Department’s recommendation to fire him was not ordered by the president, a White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said.

Ms. Sanders said that Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, had acted on his own when he recommended to Mr. Trump during a meeting on Monday that Mr. Comey be dismissed. At that meeting, the president directed Mr. Rosenstein to put the recommendation into writing, Ms. Sanders said.

After meeting with the Russian officials, Mr. Trump said he had fired Mr. Comey because “he wasn’t doing a good job.”

“Very simply — he was not doing a good job,” he said.

Asked whether the furor over the firing had affected his meeting with Mr. Lavrov, Mr. Trump said, “Not at all.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/us/politics/trump-comey-firing.html?hp