Internal Trump White House discussions to fire FBI Director Comey involving Bannon, Priebus, Kushner, and Stephen Miller

Comey. “Comey was a rat,” repeated Trump. There were rats everywhere and you had to get rid of them. John Dean, John Dean, he repeated. “Do you know what John Dean did to Nixon?” Trump, who saw history through personalities—people he might have liked or disliked —was a John Dean freak. He went bananas when a now gray and much aged Dean appeared on talk shows to compare the Trump-Russia investigation to Watergate. That would bring the president to instant attention and launch an inevitable talk-back monologue to the screen about loyalty and what people would do for media attention. It might also be accompanied by several revisionist theories Trump had about Watergate and how Nixon had been framed. And always there were rats. A rat was someone who would take you down for his own advantage. If you had a rat, you needed to kill it. And there were rats all around. (Later, it was Bannon who had to take the president aside and tell him that John Dean had been the White House counsel in the Nixon administration, so maybe it would be a good idea to lighten up on McGahn.) As the meeting went on, Bannon, from the doghouse and now, in their mutual antipathy to Jarvanka, allied with Priebus, seized the opportunity to make an impassioned case opposing any move against Comey—which was also, as much, an effort to make the case against Jared and Ivanka and their allies, “the geniuses.” (“The geniuses” was one of Trump’s terms of derision for anybody who might annoy him or think they were smarter than him, and Bannon now appropriated the term and applied it to Trump’s family.) Offering forceful and dire warnings, Bannon told the president: “This Russian story is a third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it'll be the biggest story in the world.” By the time the meeting ended, Bannon and Priebus believed they had prevailed. But that weekend, at Bedminster, the president, again listening to the deep dismay of his daughter and son-in-law, built up another head of steam. With Jared and Ivanka, Stephen Miller was also along for the weekend. The weather was bad and the president missed his golf game, dwelling, with Jared, on his Comey fury. It was Jared, in the version told by those outside the Jarvanka circle, that pushed for action, once more winding up his father- in-law. With the president’s assent, Kushner, in this version, gave Miller notes on why the FBI director should be fired and asked him to draft a letter that could set out the basis for immediate dismissal. Miller—less than a deft drafting hand—trecruited Hicks to help, another person without clearly relevant abilities. (Miller would later be admonished by Bannon for letting himself get tied up, and potentially implicated, in the Comey mess.) The letter, in the panicky draft assembled by Miller and Hicks, either from Kushner’s directions or on instructions directly coming from the president, was an off-the-wall mishmash containing the talking points—Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020044