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| Live Updates and Reactions to F.B.I. Director Comey’s Firing | Live Updates and Reactions to F.B.I. Director Comey’s Firing |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| ■ President Trump has fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, the White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Tuesday. | |
| ■ Mr. Comey’s dismissal drew a quick rebuke from Democrats, with several calling for an independent prosecutor to take over the investigation into Russian meddling in the election. | |
| In a letter to Mr. Comey dated Tuesday, Mr. Trump said: | In a letter to Mr. Comey dated Tuesday, Mr. Trump said: |
| Reaction to Mr. Comey’s surprising firing was swift, and Mr. Trump’s critics said it showed the need for an independent investigation. | |
| Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in a Twitter post that Mr. Comey “should be immediately called to testify in an opening hearing about the status of Russia/Trump investigation at the time he was fired.” | |
| Senior White House and Justice Department officials had been working on building a case against Mr. Comey since at least last week, according to administration officials. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had been charged with coming up with reasons to fire him, the officials said. | |
| — Michael S. Schmidt | |
| Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat who is up for re-election next year in Pennsylvania, a state Mr. Trump won, said, “This is Nixonian.” | |
| He called for the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, to “immediately appoint a special counsel to continue the Trump/Russia investigation.” | |
| Mr. Casey drew a direct link between Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian involvement in the election. | |
| “On March 20, Director Comey said, ‘I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the F.B.I., as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,’” Mr. Casey said. | |
| “This investigation must be independent and thorough in order to uphold our nation’s system of justice.” | |
| — Matt Flegenheimer | |
| Some of the reaction to the firing broke down along party lines. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Mr. Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation was: | |
| — Matt Flegenheimer | |
| In an interview on Fox News, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted that Mr. Trump did not “fire the entire F.B.I.” | |
| “He fired the director of the F.B.I.,” she said. “And any suggestion that this is somehow going to stop the F.B.I.’s investigation of the attempts by the Russians to influence the elections last fall is really patently absurd.” | |
| — Thomas Kaplan | |
| In the final days of the presidential campaign, while Democrats were criticizing Mr. Comey for publicly reopening the Clinton investigation, Mr. Trump had his back. He said that what Mr. Comey had done “took guts.” Those actions are now at the heart of Mr. Comey’s firing. | |
| In October, Mr. Sessions also praised Mr. Comey’s decisions in the Clinton investigation. He said Mr. Comey “had an absolute duty” to announce that he was reopening the investigation, despite its being 11 days from the election. | |
| — Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman | |
| Speaking on the Senate floor, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois condemned the firing. “Any attempt to stop or undermine this F.B.I. investigation would raise grave constitutional issues,” he said. “We await clarification by the White House as soon as possible as to whether this investigation will continue and whether it will have a credible lead so that we know that it’ll have a just outcome.” | Speaking on the Senate floor, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois condemned the firing. “Any attempt to stop or undermine this F.B.I. investigation would raise grave constitutional issues,” he said. “We await clarification by the White House as soon as possible as to whether this investigation will continue and whether it will have a credible lead so that we know that it’ll have a just outcome.” |
| — Matt Flegenheimer | |
| “I don’t think it will have an impact, certainly not on the Intelligence Committee’s work,” said Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican on the committee. Asked whether Mr. Comey’s firing would fuel calls for a special prosecutor, Mr. Rubio demurred, saying, “That’s somebody else’s decision to make.” | |
| — Emmarie Huetteman | |
| Television news anchors rushed to react in real time to the White House announcement, which came with no warning at 5:41 p.m. ABC and CBS broke into regular daytime programming with special reports; NBC joined at 6 p.m., interrupting local newscasts. | |
| Cable news lagged a few minutes behind Twitter, and some on-air hosts, including Fox News’s Eric Bolling, simply read off developments from their smartphones. | |
| Fox News was the first cable network to alert viewers of Mr. Comey’s exit, but its on-air headline was, at first, incorrect: “James Comey Resigns.” It was soon corrected to reflect the involuntary nature of Mr. Comey’s departure. | |
| — Michael M. Grynbaum |