Andrew McCarthy: ‘Just Stupid’ to Compare Comey Firing to Nixon

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Andrew McCarthy said there was “a lot of prudence” in President Donald Trump’s decision to act on the Justice Department’s recommendation and fire FBI Director James Comey, during an interview Wednesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

McCarthy, a contributing editor for National Review, noted that the outraged left is twisting the nature of Comey’s firing and comparing it to former President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in an attempt to “resuscitate” the Russia-Trump collusion narrative. Insisting that the Trump administration’s displeasure over Comey’s conduct over the past year has been “so transparent,” McCarthy accused the Democrats of hypocrisy.

“Comey’s been the same guy throughout. The only thing that’s different is the politics of the moment.”

“[The Democrats] swooned over Comey in July when he said that [Hillary] Clinton shouldn’t be charged. Then they ripped him in October when he reopened and then reclosed the investigation,” McCarthy said. “They branded him a Trump partisan when the votes were counted. And now they’re back in swoon mode.”

McCarthy made clear the Democrats have shifted only as the politics have changed.

“Comey’s been the same guy throughout. The only thing that’s different is the politics of the moment,” McCarthy said. “So now they think that by invoking Watergate — which was a real, concrete scandal supported by lots and lots of evidence — they can, you know, somehow implicitly say that the Russia-Trump thing, which is moribund because it doesn’t look like there’s anything to it in terms of this collusion aspect of it that they’ve argued — they’re hoping to resuscitate it by … these overblown comparisons between Trump and Nixon.”

“The whole thing is just stupid. The Nixon thing was first and foremost a criminal investigation. The Russia case — whatever you think of it — has never been a criminal investigation,” McCarthy added. “A criminal investigation and an intelligence investigation are not close to being the same thing.”

Noting that there has thus far been “nothing to the collusion scheme,” McCarthy insisted that it won’t “be resuscitated by an overblown comparison to Nixon.”

Former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova agreed with McCarthy’s assessment, saying Wednesday that Watergate comparisons were “utter nonsense.”

“This is just ridiculous. The Democrats, starting in July, wanted Comey’s head. And then in October they wanted it even more,” diGenova said in a separate interview on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” “What the Democrats say about this is really insignificant and irrelevant. What matters is the FBI and restoring it to credibility.”

McCarthy noted that Trump fired Comey after receiving recommendations from both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and newly confirmed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

“I think the president’s got a right to do that and there’s a lot of prudence in that,” McCarthy said. “The interesting thing … is if you look at [Rosenstein’s] memo, it really adopts the Democratic case against Comey.”

McCarthy said that the deputy attorney general’s memo advising Trump to dismiss Comey “doesn’t have anything in it of what you would call the Republican critique of Comey.”

“Instead, Clinton was basically taken as a victim,” McCarthy said.

The timing of Trump’s firing of Comey allowed Rosenstein — who was recently confirmed by the Senate with a lot of Democratic support — to weigh in on the matter.

“He’s not as much of a lightning rod as Jeff Sessions is in a political sense,” McCarthy noted. “And then they’ve written what I think is a pretty bulletproof case that Comey violated a lot of law enforcement protocols, adopting the Democrat slant on the Comey critique. And they’ve therefore given them a very small target to shoot at.”

“And as a result, what you’ve seen is they’ve got nothing but this Russian thing to scream and yell about. And I just don’t think anybody’s going to pay it much mind,” McCarthy said.

Although Trump’s timing in firing Comey may have been more tardy than many Americans thought it would be, diGenova said “the president had no choice,” though it would have been “cleaner” if Comey was fired immediately on Inauguration Day.

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“While I would have done this on Inauguration Day, the president decided to give Jim Comey an opportunity to restore his credibility as a director and the credibility of the FBI,” diGenova said. “And after that [Senate committee] testimony last week, the president and his people concluded that James Comey was irredeemable.”

“I think James Comey had reached an emotional point where this was so much about him that he could no longer function effectively as the leader of the FBI,” diGenova added. “And I give the president a lot of credit for giving him a chance to redeem himself. But again, he was irredeemable.”

Nevertheless, the Democrats — led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — used Comey’s firing to repeat raucous calls for an independent prosecutor to investigate unproven ties between Trump officials and the Russians. In response, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) rejected the notion on the Senate floor Wednesday.

“I aways think, Laura, that people who call for a special prosecutor really don’t know what one is. They frankly think that if they call it a special prosecutor that will make it independent. But there is no such thing as an independent prosecutor because at the end everybody answers to the president,” McCarthy said. “So ultimately they’re going to answer basically to Sessions, and Rosenstein, but ultimately to Trump.”

Now that Comey is out and the hunt for the new FBI director has begun in earnest, diGenova urged Americans to look past the Democrats’ hypocritical outrage.

“What was important was for Comey to go. And it was never going to be clean now at this point. It was never going to be pretty. It was going to be ugly,” diGenova said. “And of course with the Democrats in the destroy-Trump mode, it was going to be contentious.”