Trump’s impulsive decision to fire Comey has hurt him. How badly, time will tell

A week ago — but it seems like a month — President Trump and congressional leaders gathered in the Rose Garden to celebrate the House passage of their healthcare bill.

The path ahead in the Senate seemed difficult and the political prospects grim, as Cathy Decker wrote, but administration officials and supporters could truthfully say that, after several false starts, they were moving forward on their legislative agenda.

Trump changed that in a hurry.

Good afternoon, I’m David Lauter, Washington bureau chief. Welcome to the Friday edition of our Essential Politics newsletter, in which we look at the events of the week in Washington and elsewhere in national politics and highlight some particularly insightful stories.

A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND

Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey unfolded the way a lot of his actions have — impulsive, subject to minimal review by aides, surrounded by misleading statements.

Many Democrats fear that the firing presaged a full-scale effort by the administration to scotch the investigation into possible ties between Trump associates and Russian agents who sought to influence the 2016 election.

That could yet happen, but, at least for now, the firing seems less part of a carefully considered plot and more the rash decision of a president who spent a rainy weekend in New Jersey watching clips of Comey with his TiVo, growing steadily more angry at the telegenic FBI director who was unwilling to publicly exonerate him.

If anything, the firing focused new attention on the investigation, making any White House effort to slow it down more fraught.

Moreover, Comey’s dismissal removed the only person with the bipartisan stature to bring the investigation to an eventual close and clear Trump associates — assuming that some or all of them are innocent.

“We’re on an inevitable path toward things like special prosecutors” because otherwise “we’re facing a legitimacy crisis,” Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Institution expert on national security law who has been closely tracking the Russia investigation, told me.

Trump made everything worse for himself, as he has in the past, by allowing — perhaps causing— his spokespeople to mislead reporters and the public about what had happened.

On Tuesday, White House officials said that Trump had decided to fire Comey after a recommendation from Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod J. Rosenstein, who is overseeing the Russia investigation because Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions has recused himself.

Rosenstein’s review, which criticized Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices, “was presented to the president today,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Tuesday night.

“No one from the White House” ordered Rosenstein to conduct his review, Spicer added. “It was all him.”

That explanation began to unravel within hours, in part because of protests by Rosenstein. On Wednesday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders admitted that Trump met with Sessions and Rosenstein on Monday and had asked Rosenstein to write up his criticisms of Comey.

On Thursday, Trump radically contradicted the initial story, saying he had planned to fire Comey all along, would have done it “regardless of recommendation” and had based the decision, not on Comey’s handling of the email investigation, but on “this Russia thing.”

Friday, returning to Twitter, Trump essentially admitted that the original story was untrue and offered an unusual excuse: “It is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” he tweeted, saying that was true because he was “a very active President with lots of things happening.”

[Twitter has long been Trump’s favored means of pushing his message. We’re compiling all of Trump’s tweets. It’s a great resource. Take a look.]

The administration’s original story had a deeply implausible element to it, as Evan Halper had written that first night: Why would Trump fire Comey for actions toward Clinton that he had loudly applauded during the campaign?

Questions about the history of special prosecutors? Mark Barabak has answers. Want to know more about Rosenstein, Joe Tanfani provides the background. And new Los Angeles Times White House Editor Jackie Calmes has this profile of Comey.

As Lisa Mascaro and Mike Memoli wrote, the White House so far has retained the backing from the Republicans they need the most, notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, but even he may not be able to indefinitely hold off pressure for a special counsel.

Rosenstein will brief the full Senate on the investigation and related matters next week, McConnell and Democratic Leader Charles S. Schumer of New York announced. [And track how each senator has responded to the Comey affair with our interactive.]

Meanwhile, the overlapping investigations by the FBI and both congressional intelligence committees — House and Senate — continue apace, Tanfani and David Cloud reported.

On Monday, Sally Yates, the former deputy attorney general, provided the Senate Judiciary Committee a detailed account of the warnings that she gave White House counsel Don McGahn about Flynn’s conduct.

This week, subpoenas went out to Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn.

And the acting head of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, assured senators on Thursday that the FBI probe had sufficient resources and that he would notify members of Congress if anyone tried to interfere with it.

“You cannot stop the men and women of the FBI from doing the right thing,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

RUSSIANS AT THE WHITE HOUSE

On Wednesday, Trump met in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, seemingly a symbolic thumb in the eye to critics who fear that he’s cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Making matters worse — at least from the press standpoint — the pool of reporters and photographers who typically observe at least the start of such meetings were excluded from this session, but Tass, the Russian state-controlled news agency, was allowed to have a photographer present.

As a result, the American public’s initial images of Trump shaking hands with the two Russians in the Oval Office came from the Russian government.

SLOW MOVEMENT ON HEALTHCARE

Senators have started to grapple with one of the central issues in the healthcare debate, Noam Levey writes: how to balance cutting taxes against preserving health benefits.

The House-passed healthcare bill is, in large part, a huge tax cut for upper-income Americans offset by deep cuts in Medicaid. Several senators want to go easier on Medicaid, but that would require reducing the size of the tax cuts.

With 52 senators on the GOP side, McConnell can only afford to lose two votes. At the conservative end of the GOP caucus, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and perhaps others want to go further than the House in repealing elements of Obamacare. At the other end, centrists, including Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, want to preserve parts of the law that are important to low-income citizens of their states.

Trying to come up with a bill that will satisfy those competing factions may prove impossible. At minimum, it will take a long time, McConnell said this week. Don’t expect Senate votes until next month at the earliest, with later in the summer a strong possibility.

VOTER FRAUD?

Trump finally issued a long-expected order setting up a commission to look into voter fraud. As has been true with many of his executive orders, this one proved far less sweeping than Trump’s rhetoric, Noah Bierman reported.

The commission is advisory only, and the order says nothing about Trump’s false allegations that millions of people voted illegally in 2016.

Nonetheless, many groups on the left reacted strongly against the commission and, especially it’s vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has strongly advocated restrictive voting laws.

On the other hand, Kobach’s role in the commission may mean that he’s out of the running for a more significant post in the administration. During the transition, he campaigned hard for a job setting policy on immigration, where he has been among the country’s foremost advocates of restrictive policies.

There’s extensive evidence that fraudulent voting is at most a minor problem in national elections. Some of the problems that did plague the 2016 election — long lines caused by an inadequate number of polling places, for example — may not be of interest to Kobach.

Here’s another example, as John Myers wrote: many polling places in California lacked enough ballots in languages other than English, which state law mandates them to have.

LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has had a remarkable run in the past few months. Despite being badly outnumbered, she has skillfully exploited the divisions among Republicans to secure at least some of her party’s legislative priorities.

With party strategists believing that Trump’s unpopularity could open the way for Democrats to regain control of the House in the 2018 election, the San Francisco Democrat has been even more successful than normal in raising money from liberals. Mascaro took a look at Pelosi enjoying her role as leader of the opposition.

Even Pelosi isn’t liberal enough for some Democrats. Barabak wrote this profile of a challenger back home who wants to run a primary against her from the left.

BACK TO MANDATORY DRUG SENTENCES

Sessions has ordered federal prosecutors to go back to a tougher line on drug crimes, Tanfani reported. Under the new policy, prosecutors should “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” in drug cases, according to new orders issued Friday.

Under the Obama administration, former Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. had directed prosecutors to reserve the toughest charges, which carry long, mandatory sentences, for high-level traffickers and violent criminals. That led to a sharp decline in the number of people subject to mandatory sentences. The new policy is almost certain to reverse that trend.

DIVISIONS ON THE ENVIRONMENT

The administration continues to be split on how aggressively to roll back Obama-era policies on global warming.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson took part in a meeting in Alaska of the international Arctic Council, a gathering of countries and native groups that govern parts of the Arctic. There, Bill Yardley reports, he signed a declaration that cites the “need for action at all levels” to combat climate change.

How much to protect federal lands is also proving to be a divisive issue for the administration. This week, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke toured areas in Utah that have been designated as national monuments. Many state residents see the monument protections as harmful to the local economy. Last month, Trump signed an order telling Zinke to review whether to revoke protections for monuments created by Presidents Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton.

As Halper wrote, the administration may not have the legal authority to change the monument designations — a longstanding interpretation of federal law says they can’t — but Zinke’s visit could help solidify Trump’s political support among Western conservatives, which was a weak spot in the 2016 election.

Yardley wrote about another aspect of some of the Utah national monuments — race.

The Bears Ears monument, in particular, which was created by Obama in December, has been a center of tensions between Native American groups that support the monument designation and white conservatives who oppose it.

Meanwhile, Halper wrote, the oil industry and its allies in the administration suffered a rare defeat in Congress this week: The Senate defeated a measure to roll back an Obama regulation on methane emissions from oil and gas pipelines, refineries and other equipment.

Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, so even though the amount of methane emissions that occur is much smaller than emissions of carbon dioxide, controlling methane leaks makes a bigger difference regarding global warming.

Methane leaks also contribute heavily to smog in otherwise clean Western skies in places like New Mexico and Arizona. That’s a big part of why Sen. John McCain of Arizona cast the deciding vote against the repeal measure.

TRAVEL BAN STILL IN COURT

Remember Trump’s travel ban? A federal appeals court heard arguments Monday on whether the ban violates the Constitution. David Savage analyzed the questions that the judges asked. One of the notable points in the argument: the injunction blocking the travel ban order has prevented the administration from moving ahead on policies to vet potential immigrants. The administration could have taken steps on vetting if Trump had never issued an order. So for now, the travel ban has simply been a backfire.

A second federal appeals court panel will hear arguments in a similar case this week.

THE FINAL CABINET MEMBER

Trump got the last of his Cabinet-level appointments through the Senate, with the confirmation on Thursday of Robert Lighthizer to be the U.S. trade representative. Lighthizer overcame opposition from McCain and Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Now, as Don Lee reported, he will have to find ways of reconciling the administration’s widely divergent factions on trade as he dives into negotiations over the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade deals.

RESTING IN THE SUN

Republican National Committee members were meeting this week at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, and as Cathy Decker and Seema Mehta report, the warm Pacific sun provided a respite from the turmoil in Washington. Even amid the required optimism of such gatherings, however, a few discordant notes could be heard — albeit anonymously.

“I’d like to see him get some stuff done,” one RNC member told them about President Trump.

Democrats, too, are enjoying the California sunshine. Silicon Valley has become a “retirement community for D.C. political vets,” Matt McKenna, a Clinton administration official who now runs a crisis communications shop in Sausalito, told Mehta.

Follow reporters Mehta and Decker on our Essential Washington blog as they cover the RNC meeting all weekend.

LOGISTICS

That wraps up this week. My colleague Christina Bellantoni will be back Monday with the weekday edition of Essential Politics. Until then, keep track of all the developments in national politics and the Trump administration with our Essential Washington blog, at our Politics page and on Twitter @latimespolitics.

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David.lauter@latimes.com

@davidlauter