Dismissal of James Comey

James Comey, the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was fired by U.S. President Donald Trump on May 9, 2017. Comey had been criticized in 2016 for his handling of the FBI's investigation of the Hillary Clinton email controversy and in 2017 for the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections as it related to alleged collusion with Trump's presidential campaign.

Trump dismissed Comey by way of a termination letter in which he stated that he was acting on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. In the following days, he gave numerous explanations of the dismissal that contradicted his staff and also belied the initial impression that Sessions and Rosenstein had influenced his decision. Trump publicly stated that he had already decided to fire Comey; it later emerged that he had written his own early draft of the termination letter, and had solicited the Rosenstein memo the day before citing it. He also stated that dismissing Comey relieved unnecessary pressure on his ability to engage and negotiate with Russia, due to Comey's "grandstanding and politicizing" the investigation. Trump was reportedly "enormously frustrated" that Comey would not publicly confirm that the president was not personally under investigation. After his dismissal, Comey publicly testified to the Congress that he told Trump, on three occasions, that he was not personally under investigation in the counterintelligence probe.

Shortly after his termination, in a move that he hoped would prompt a special counsel investigation, Comey asked a friend to share excerpts from a memo he had written when he was FBI Director, recounting a private conversation with Trump in February 2017, with the press. According to Comey, Trump had asked him to "let go" of potential charges against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn whom Trump had fired the day before. In light of the dismissal, the series of memos, and Comey's testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, several media figures, political opponents and legal scholars said that Trump's acts could be construed as obstruction of justice, while others disagreed.

Following Comey's dismissal, Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate into Russian meddling and related issues that Comey had supervised during his tenure. In December 2019, US Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote in the "Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation" that the FBI showed no political bias by opening the investigation.