The Comey show: the FBI director and the pea

Yesterday was Comey's day at the Senate. I listened to a part of it but I was not impressed.

First of all there is that ridiculous anti-Russia hysteria - including senators who lie that we here in Europe are even more obsessed about it. We have trust in our elections. It is the Americans - who allow their oligarchs to buy elections - who are worried about manipulations.

Russiagate reminds me of Monicagate. In both cases the real facts are maybe a bit embarrassing but certainly not a big deal. There are only two reasons for this circus. One is that it keeps the president for a long time negative in the news. The other is the hope that the president will somewhere during this judicial circus make a misstep and then you can persecute him for obstruction of justice or something similar.

It seemed to me that Comey was playing "The Princess and the Pea" with Trump as the bully who hurt his tender judicial aura. My impression is that something rather different was playing in their interaction. Trump was annoyed that those endless Russia investigations made it impossible for him to have a sound foreign policy. Newspapers judged everything as possible evidence that he was favoring Russia and that made it hard to make decisions based on their merits. So Trump first asked Comey whether it was possible to end this circus. Comey was non-committal. But Trump - for all his defects - is a good judge of character: he has built a television career on it with his The Apprentice show. And Trump very likely concluded that Comey was a "showboat" who liked the spectacle and would keep the issue in the news as long as possible.

Who wouldn't have fired Comey if that was the conclusion?

PS
Here is a critical article about Comey from 2013 - when he became FBI director. According to the article While Comey deserves credit for stopping an illegal spying program in dramatic fashion, he also approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration during his time as deputy attorney general. Those included torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention.