By DAVID KRAVETS (US) From ars Technica

“Today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” Trump says.

FBI Director James Comey was fired Tuesday by President Donald Trump over his handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal. A search has begun to replace Comey, who was appointed to the position by President Barack Obama in 2013.

“The FBI is one of our nation’s most cherished and respected institutions, and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” President Trump said in a statement. Comey’s removal was recommended by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Rosenstein wrote in a Justice Department memo that Comey was wrong to close the investigation into whether Clinton should be prosecuted for running a private e-mail server from her New York residence when she was secretary of state. Comey also should not have announced July 5 that the investigation was closed. “The director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”

Instead of saying the FBI examination was closed, the director should have announced the probe was completed and referred the matter to federal prosecutors to decide whether to prosecute. The FBI, Deputy AG Rosenstein wrote in the memo, “is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department.”

Rosenstein’s position on Comey, which Sessions said he backed, also blasted the now-fired director for announcing 11 days before the November election that the FBI was revisiting the Clinton scandal. And then, just two days before the election, Comey announced that the case was, again, closed. “The way the director handled the conclusion of the e-mail investigation was wrong,” Rosenstein wrote.

Comey’s firing comes as the bureau is investigating the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia and as the Justice Department is in the middle of an open investigation into Comey’s handling of the Clinton matter. It is unclear how today’s development impacts those investigations.

Anthony Romero, the American Civil Liberties Union’s executive director, said that “The independence of the FBI director is meant to ensure that the president does not operate above the law. For President Trump to fire the man responsible for investigating his own campaign’s ties to the Russians imperils that fundamental principle.”

Democrats in Washington were equally alarmed. “The president has removed the sitting FBI Director in the midst of one of the most critical national security investigations in the history of our country—one that implicates senior officials in the Trump campaign and administration. This is nothing less than Nixonian,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said in a statement.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden weighed in. He defended Comey despite tweeting that Comey “has sought for years to jail me on account of my political activities.” Another Snowden tweet about the firing said: “Set politics aside: every American should condemn such political interference in the bureau’s work.”

Comey told a Senate panel on Wednesday that it would have been “catastrophic” for the bureau to not have disclosed in October, just 11 days before the presidential election, that the agency was revisiting the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal. Many Democrats suggested that the announcement was responsible for Trump’s win over Clinton.

“It makes me mildly nauseous to think we had an impact on the election,” Comey said. He later added that “I cannot consider for a second whose political futures will be affected and in what way. We have to ask ourselves what is the right thing to do and then do it.”

Comey said that to not have disclosed the re-opened investigation would have amounted to “an act of concealment” because he had already said the Clinton probe was over.

The Justice Department said FBI Deputy Director Andrew McAbe will assume the acting director role. Unless a special prosecutor is appointed to oversee the FBI probe, as some Democrats have suggested, the president’s pick to lead the agency would oversee the Russia-Trump campaign investigation.

This post originated on Ars Technica

IMAGE: Brookings Institution

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