From the same piece, Wittes’s thoughts on Trump and Comey.

For a lot of readers, the easy part of the book will be Comey’s discussion of his interactions with Trump. There is no moral complexity here. There are no serious questions of whether Comey should have behaved differently—not in the macro sense, at least. There is only the question of whether one believes Comey or Trump about the nature of their interactions. And to pose that question is also to answer it. One of them is a man who, whatever his flaws, is not a liar and who has numerous contemporaneous corroborating witnesses and documents. The other is Donald Trump. I suppose another question is whether one believes the president’s behavior as described by Comey is acceptable. But to ask that question is to answer it too. Of course Comey is telling the truth. And of course the president’s conduct is not acceptable.

Why “of course”? Because we see Trump. We see him every day. He tells us what he thinks, and how he thinks. Of course he carried on the way Comey says he did. It’s utterly characteristic of him. We recognize it.

Wittes thought all along that Trump would fire Comey – before the election he thought it.

I believed that Trump would fire Comey because it was clear who Trump is, and I knew who Comey is. I had a feeling they could not coexist. A tyranny cannot have independent law enforcement and remain an effective tyranny. A would-be tyrant thus must purge government of law enforcement that would be independent. He simply must get the law enforcement apparatus under his control—that is, protecting his friends and himself and arrayed against his enemies. I did not know who would be the Trump administration’s attorney general or deputy attorney general. But I knew that Trump would not be able to get law enforcement under his control with Comey in office—so I worried that he would remove Comey sooner or later. That this came to pass, and quickly, is not a reflection of my prescience. It is a reflection of what Comey, in his testimony to the Senate intelligence committee, called “the nature of the person.”

A tyranny cannot have independent law enforcement and remain an effective tyranny.

So we’d better make damn sure we go on having independent law enforcement. Mitch McConnell is doing his best to stop us; that has to change.

This is the story line on which the public should focus—on which, indeed, focus is democratically imperative. This story line continues to this day in the president’s threats to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Bob Mueller, in the possibility of pardons for major witnesses, and in the vicious smears of career law enforcement officials and the sliming of the attorney general for the supposedly iniquitous crime of recusing himself from an investigation in which his conflicts were both manifest and manifold.

Yet the public discussion of Comey, his book and his public presence does not manage to focus on this story line. And this is one of the great tragedies of the Clinton email investigation.

…

At the end of the day, I don’t know what I think of how Comey handled the Clinton email investigation. I go back and forth about whether the best of bad options worked out badly or whether this was a string of bad moves and unforced errors. My concern is that an inability to see whatever errors Comey made as the good-faith failings of a decent man trying his best under extraordinary circumstances affects the ability to process his interactions with Trump. Inevitably, your view of the Comey-Clinton story affects your ability to focus on the Comey-Trump story. It’s hard to focus on the Comey-Trump story if you believe the Comey-Clinton story is one of—at the extreme—partisan intervention by the FBI on Trump’s behalf. It’s hard if you believe it was a story of ego-driven showboating and moral vanity on the part of a man who loves the spotlight. It’s hard if you convince yourself that Comey’s action affected the outcome of the election. It’s really hard if you’ve persuaded yourself to ignore the many other factors that contributed to Clinton’s loss and Trump’s win—and all the other factors that contributed to the Justice Department’s handling of this particular case. It’s also really hard if you’re not open to grappling with the Kierkegaardian reality that Comey faced.

At least the choices now are clearer. Trump must not be allowed to do away with independent law enforcement. Trump must not be allowed to become an absolute tyrant with no checks.