Eli Lake, Columnist

Trump and Comey Go Down Together

The FBI boss made things easy on the President with his mistakes on Clinton's emails and Russian meddling.

May 10, 2017 at 8:32 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

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James Comey was the most powerful man in Washington. Or at least that's what I wrote two months ago, following Comey's explosive confirmation to Congress that there was an active FBI counterintelligence probe into possible collusion between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

I reasoned that it would be politically suicidal to fire the FBI director in the middle of an ongoing probe into the president's associates. I was wrong. My column assumed that even Trump would abide by basic political norms, or for that matter basic political optics. The Trump does not abide. And here we are.