President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with independence. Most prominently, he dismissed Comey after it became clear that Comey could not be pressured into protecting the administration and was expanding its Russia investigation. Only once in the FBI’s eighty-two-year history had a president fired the bureau’s director before his ten-year term was up—and in that case, the move was in response to clear ethical violations and enjoyed bipartisan support.
