President Trump fires FBI director

The US president fired the head of the FBI on Tuesday evening. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the Justice Department had concluded that FBI Director James Comey had mismanaged the investigation into allegations against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump's presidential rival.

"The president accepted the recommendation of the attorney general and the deputy attorney general and signed an order to fire the director of the intelligence department," Spicer told reporters Tuesday evening.

In a statement released by Mr. Trump, he noted that Comey's firing was based on the recommendation of Attorney General James Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenthal.

According to Spicer, Mr. Comey was informed of his firing order and his firing took place immediately.

In his letter to James Comey, Donald Trump wrote: "New leadership must be found for the FBI immediately to restore public confidence in this major law enforcement agency."

Comey's role in the last presidential election

According to previous reports, the FBI director, who was appointed by President Barack Obama for a ten-year term, intended to remain in the position until the end of his term.

Last week, Hillary Clinton said that one of the factors in her defeat was James Comey's letter about her emails a few days before the election.

Three months before the election, the Obama administration's Justice Department announced that no wrongdoing had occurred in the Clinton email case, but just two weeks before the election, the FBI director suddenly announced that the agency would resume its investigation into Clinton's emails.

The New York Times reported at the time that new emails related to Mrs. Clinton's case were found on a computer belonging to Huma Abedin and her ex-husband, Anthony Weiner, and are now in the hands of the FBI.

Although at the time some interpreted this FBI action as undermining Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration's Department of Justice announced that it would cooperate with the FBI to expedite the investigation into Clinton's emails.

It was only one day before the election that the FBI again announced that Clinton's new emails also showed no evidence of a crime.

The Clinton Email Affair or the Russia Investigation

The Washington Post reported that senior Justice Department officials concluded that Comey had violated the principle of not bringing up pending cases in the Hillary Clinton private email case.

At the same time, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, thanked Comey for his service in a letter and stated that changing the leadership of the FBI was probably the best course of action.

But Democrats say the reason for Mr. Comey's firing is new details about Donald Trump's possible ties to Russia, which have already led to the dismissal of Michael Flynn.

Mrs. Clinton, who used a personal email account for government work instead of a government one as Secretary of State, was under legal scrutiny months before the presidential election. Her private email, served from a computer in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York, did not have the security required for classified government emails.

Last week, US President Donald Trump accused ousted FBI Director James Comey of ignoring Hillary Clinton's "bad deeds" after he declared that Mrs. Clinton had committed no crime in using a personal computer for government emails.

Source: Voice of America