As Washington reels over the abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey, some are saying his dismissal was long overdue.”I think it was a culmination of a lot of events,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice.
One of those events was Comey’s decision to not recommend charges be brought against Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified information while she was secretary of state.
“James Comey over the last several years has overstepped his bounds,” Sekulow charged, “has not understood the jurisdiction of his office, has been derelict in his duties in that regard, and also has, quite frankly, engaged in political activities that are in our lifetime unprecedented.”
Sekulow speculated that the straw that broke the camel’s back was when “the FBI had to go in and clarify once again the testimony of James Comey” regarding the Clinton email investigation. In testimony before Congress last week, the director said Clinton aide Huma Abedin forwarded “hundreds of thousands of emails, some of which contained classified information.”
But Tuesday evening, the FBI corrected Comey’s comments, saying they were wrong and his testimony was misleading. “I think the FBI internally had had enough of this,” Sekulow said.
Meanwhile, the ACLJ chief counsel is dismissing Democratic suspicions over the timing of Comey’s firing, which came during the investigation into whether individuals from the Trump team had ties with Russia, which has been accused of meddling in the U.S. election.
“Remember, up until he was fired the Democrats were calling for him to be fired,” Sekulow noted. “Everybody forgets that. When he was fired, they’re acting like it was comparable to the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ under Nixon. It’s absurd.”
“And all this obfuscation on the Russia investigation – first of all you had (former national security chief James) Clapper and (former acting attorney general) Sally Yates basically saying ‘no evidence of collusion,'” he noted. “They’ll continue to investigate it – that’s fine – but you don’t need James Comey to do that.”
Sekulow went on to praise President Donald Trump’s actions as those of a strong, decisive leader.
“Maybe what’s shocking Washington right now is that we actually have a president that makes a decision,” he said. “And the decision was that James Comey, for the good of the country and for the good of the FBI, had to go.”