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As it happened, the Justice Department—Attorney General Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—were, independent of the president’s own course, preparing their case against Comey. They would take the Bedminster line and blame Comey for errors of his handling of the Clinton email mess—a problematic charge, because if that was truly the issue, why wasn’t Comey dismissed on that basis as soon as the Trump administration took office? But in fact, quite regardless of the Sessions and Rosenstein case, the president had determined to act on his own. Jared and Ivanka were urging the president on, but even they did not know that the axe would shortly fall. Hope Hicks, Trump’s steadfast shadow, who otherwise knew everything the president thought—not least because he was helpless not to express it out loud—didn’t know. Steve Bannon, however much he worried that the president might blow, didn’t know. His chief of staff didn’t know. And his press secretary didn’t know. The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue. At some point that afternoon Trump told his daughter and son-in-law about his plan. They immediately became coconspirators and firmly shut out any competing advice. Eerily, it was a notably on-time and unruffled day in the West Wing. Mark Halperin, the political reporter and campaign chronicler, was waiting in the reception area for Hope Hicks, who fetched him a bit before 5:00 p.m. Fox’s Howard Kurtz was there, too, waiting for his appointment with Sean Spicer. And Reince Priebus’s assistant had just been out to tell his five o’clock appointment it would be only a few more minutes. Just before five, in fact, the president, having not too long before notified McGahn of his intention, pulled the trigger. Trump’s personal security guard, Keith Schiller, delivered the termination letter to Comey’s office at the FBI just after five o’clock. The letter’s second sentence included the words “You are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.” Shortly thereafter, most of the West Wing staff, courtesy of an erroneous report from Fox News, was for a brief moment under the impression that Comey had resigned. Then, in a series of information synapses throughout the offices of the West Wing, it became clear what had actually happened. “So next it’s a special prosecutor!” said Priebus in disbelief, to no one in particular, when he learned shortly before five o’clock what was happening. Spicer, who would later be blamed for not figuring out how to positively spin the Comey firing, had only minutes to process it. Not only had the decision been made by the president with almost no consultation except that of his inner family circle, but the response, and explanation, and even legal justifications, were also almost exclusively managed by him and his family. Rosenstein and Sessions’s parallel rationale for the firing was shoehorned in at the last minute, at HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020047