Trump could be absolutely right about the "Russia thing" being a " total hoax " and a Democratic Party "excuse for having lost the election." But that would not affect his attempted bribe of Comey, seeking Comey's loyalty plus his exemption of Trump from the investigation of the possibly empty election hacking charges. Such an investigation might have drilled a dry hole concernng election hacking but in the process nevertheless stumble over evidence of other crimes down Trump's Emoluments money-trail.
What is most interesting about the attempted Comey bribe is the way that Trump revealed evidence of the bribe completely gratuitously in a press intervie w without there being any plausible benefit to himself in doing so. Trump volunteered that he was going to fire Comey irrespective of the perfectly good cause that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein provided in his Memorandum to the Attorney General dated May 9, 2017. That Memorandum had been forwarded to Trump with some superfluous boilerplate added by Attorney General Sessions, which in retrospect seemed inconsistent with Sessions' promise to " recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States-- which has been interpreted to require his recusal from matters involving the Russian investigation.
The first and operative paragraph of Trump's firing letter formally "accepted" the Memorandum.
The second paragraph of Trump's letter irrelevantly and even bizarrely included Trump's equivalent of an exculpatory tweet which made a connection between the firing and Trump's exemption from the Russian investigation. This second paragraph could be interpreted as conveying to Comey a "never mind" about any previous quid pro quo agreements Trump thought he had made. Maybe Trump changed his mind about a deal with Comey.
In his press interview Trump contexted his statement about firing Comey on grounds separate from those charged in the Memorandum by making further reference to the Russian investigation: "when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story..." Trump's actual motive for firing Comey was thus, according to his own words, not those stated in the original Memorandum, as had been suggested it was by the text of Trump's firing letter, not to mention by various Trump spokespersons.
There is no rational excuse for Trump to have undermined the mostly proper manner in which the complaint against Comey reached his desk by suggesting that he was going to fire Comey for entirely other reasons in any event. This merely raises questions about what those other reasons might be that were not mentioned in Rosenstein's Memorandum.
The reason stated in the Memorandum was Comey's blatantly unprofessional "handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails." It must be emphasized that, as I have detailed elsewhere , Rosenstein's analysis of the errors Comey made presented more than adequate cause to fire Comey, even if it did not include all of the available reasons Comey was unsuited to the job. Indeed Rosenstein's reasons were so powerful that it would have been improper not to fire Comey for playing politics with usurped prosecutorial powers as demonstrated there. To say that Trump obstructed justice in his communications with Comey is not to say that Trump was objectively wrong in firing Comey on Rosenstein's advice. Trump was merely stupid in talking about his own subjective reasons for firing Comey as distinct from the formal institutional and historical reasons why Comey was justifiably fired.
Rosenstein is Comey's boss. He had every right to push Comey out of the FBI soon after Rosenstein was sworn in as Deputy on April 26. Since he generated his well-crafted Memorandum only two weeks later, Rosenstein may well have contemplated firing Comey when he accepted the job of Deputy, knowing that supervising the FBI and its controversial Director would be one of his principal tasks.
Had Trump only kept his mouth shut about his subjective views, let Rosenstein do his job, and stuck with the program reflected in the firing documentation, any connection between Comey's firing and the Russian investigation would have remained mere partisan speculation. Trump's puerile impetuousness in talking about his subjective reasons gained him absolutely nothing while it created what Tribe would see as appropriate material for Articles of Impeachment, a demand that will doubtless grow. Tribe notes : "Obstruction of justice was the first count in the articles of impeachment against Nixon and, years later, a count against Bill Clinton ."
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