By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
President Trump and his administration have repeatedly asserted that fired FBI Director James Comey was unpopular among the rank-and-file and was to blame for low morale.
But an internal survey released Wednesday suggests Comey, whom Trump fired in May, was trusted and highly respected, the Associated Press reported.
A majority of survey respondents gave Comey high marks when asked if the then-director had “a positive impact on my morale.” The results mirror similar surveys dating to the start of Comey’s tenure in 2013.
The AP wrote:
Using a 1-to-5 scale, where scores between 3.81 and 5 are considered a “success in those areas,” Comey received average scores of 4.67, 4.39 and 4.38, respectively, on the morale question. Those results were tallied from 36 respondents in 2015, from 47 in 2016 and from 48 in 2017.
Respondents’ “trust and confidence” in Comey as a leader did drop slightly between 2015 and 2017 — from an average score of 4.78 to 4.46 — though it still fell within the higher end of the top benchmark for the surveys.
Trump initially cited Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email server as justification for firing him. The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, wrote a three-page memo criticizing those decisions, saying that as a result the FBI was “unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a director who understands the gravity of the mistakes.”
But Trump later said he had intended to fire Comey all along, dubbing him a “showboat.” A White House spokeswoman said then she had personally heard from “countless” agents who had complained about Comey’s leadership.
