Comey’s Firing and the Look of Power

Four thousand people work for the executive office of the President. Thirty-five thousand work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Protocols for communication between the two are well established. And yet, on Tuesday, after President Donald Trump decided to fire the F.B.I. director, James Comey, he had a letter printed out, dropped into a manila envelope, and carried to F.B.I. headquarters in the hand of his own longtime personal bodyguard, the fifty-seven-year old ex-N.Y.P.D. cop Keith Schiller. This Administration has a weakness for macho strutting: recall Vice-President Mike Pence, standing at the Korean D.M.Z., hands on hips, staring down the entire country of North Korea, as if what gave America leverage was not its planet-annihilating nuclear arsenal but a thrust, middle-aged Hoosier chest. The Trump White House also has a weakness for Schiller, who has been given the novel title of director of Oval Office operations and a brief so accommodating that it permitted him to represent the country at a meeting with the political leadership of Iraqi Kurdistan while wearing an Adidas workout top. Even for this White House, though, Comey’s ouster was remarkably ritualized and medieval: a Corleone gesture, the loyalist sent across town with a letter in his hand.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Jeff Sessions’s Role in James Comey’s Firing
New F.B.I.-Director Job Application
How Comey’s Firing Accelerates the Russia Investigations