The public impression that Trump was being criminally investigated, amplified by the president’s critics in the media, was effectively Comey’s get-out-of-jail-free card.
The former FBI director likely assumed that no president would be crazy enough to fire a man whom the public believed to be investigating the president. Only a madman would fire that guy, right? Everyone in Washington knows how this game is played. They all know the tune by heart.
Unfortunately for Comey, Trump had no intention of playing that game and dancing that dance. What really happened is that Trump was wise to Comey’s con and finally had enough of it.
He figured out what Comey was doing — deliberately refusing to correct a factually inaccurate impression of the FBI’s ongoing investigation as a means of protecting his job — and called his bluff.
Comey’s own words reveal in lurid detail the game he was playing. They reveal that Trump’s claims about the investigation, and his claims about Comey’s characterization of the investigation, were completely accurate.
They reveal that Comey was giving one impression to the president and Congress in private and deliberately allowing an entirely different one to gain currency in public. Comey’s mistake wasn’t in thinking the Beltway two-step was the best way to keep his job. His mistake was assuming that Trump wouldn’t dare to stop dancing.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/07...tatement-is-an-indictment-of-comey-not-trump/