Big-donor liberal organizations on Wednesday helped lead protests in Washington D.C. and elsewhere in response to President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey — but a glance at recent history suggests it was these same organizations and associated personalities who had been clamoring for Comey’s dismissal just months ago.
According to an account of the protests in front of the White House from Mother Jones, a left-of-center news magazine, MoveOn.org’s Washington D.C., director, Ben Wickler, claimed that Trump’s firing of Comey equates to a “constitutional crisis.”
“The fundamental rule of law in this country is at stake,” Wickler told a crowd apparently numbering in the hundreds that assembled outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which convened to protest Comey’s firing as the FBI director was still busy carrying out an investigation into alleged ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and apparent Russian election interference.
To state the obvious, this strongly suggests that the public rationale for the firing was pretextual pic.twitter.com/PKmmHStNUt
Yet it was only in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, however, that petitions calling for Comey’s resignation were hosted by MoveOn.org, due to perceptions that Comey’s handling of the investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s alleged misuse of classified State Department communications cost her the election.
Other progressives, such as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, tried to compare Comey’s dismissal to President Richard Nixon’s “Watergate” era:
The last president to do something like this was Richard Nixon. It didn’t end well …
Others noted that the only commander-in-chief to fire an FBI director was President Bill Clinton:
But Nixon didn’t fire L. Patrick Gray. He resigned. Maybe Van is thinking of Bill Clinton. He fired Bill Sessions (Whitewater investigator). https://t.co/DlOg43dUlU
The about-face of progressives who appeared to have had despised Comey only later to cry foul on his firing also included popular progressive tech bloggers like John Gruber: (warning — foul language):
One of the most curious series of social media posts related to Comey’s firing came courtesy of John Podesta, former chairman of Clinton’s 2016 election campaign:
Prominent former Obama staffers later appeared to take umbrage at the notion that Democrats who previously called for Comey’s dismissal were now lashing out hypocritically at Trump’s firing of him:
Never has a FBI director been so vociferously defended by a party that believes he threw a national election by going outside DOJ rules
Unlike too many Republicans, Democrats believe democratic norms and institutions are more important than politics and personalities https://t.co/Ap0C74r108
