Bloomberg Law
May 10, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

Comey’s Firing Is a Crisis of American Rule of Law

Noah Feldman
Bloomberg News

By Noah Feldman, Bloomberg View

It’s not a constitutional crisis . Technically, President Donald Trump was within his constitutional rights Tuesday when he fired FBI Director James Comey. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is part of the executive branch, not an independent agency. But the firing did violate a powerful unwritten norm: that the director serves a 10-year, nonrenewable term and is fired only for good cause.

Only one director has ever been removed from office involuntarily: President Bill Clinton fired Director William Sessions in 1993 after an internal report found that he had committed significant ethics violations.

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