Donald Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller, who was sent to fire James Comey, abruptly resigns amid scandal
Here’s something whose timing is either a remarkable coincidence, or a sign that Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey was even more suspicious than previously known. Earlier today, a whole scandal erupted around how Comey was fired, and the two different letters that were written by Trump’s team in that regard. Now the guy who was sent to deliver the second firing letter to Comey has abruptly resigned from the White House.
Donald Trump hired his longtime personal bodyguard Keith Schiller to a White House security position, then used him to personally deliver the news to James Comey’s office that he’d been fired. Of course Comey wasn’t in his office, and was instead across the country in California that day, and Trump probably knew that. The move always stuck out as suspicious: why would anyone, even someone as whacked out as Trump, send his own bodyguard to deliver a firing letter to an FBI Director who wasn’t even there? In any case, Schiller is now suddenly quitting.
This does not mean that Keith Schiller did anything wrong or illegal himself. It’s possible that he’s seen the new revelation about the two firing letters, and he’s simply concluded that it’s too messy for him to want to remain in that role, or perhaps he’s now feeling like Trump used him. In any case, resigning won’t get him off the hook from being a witness, and he’ll surely be hearing from Special Counsel Robert Mueller if he hasn’t already. It all points to just how strangely and suspiciously Trump approached Comey’s firing.
The real story, according to the New York Times, is that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller wrote a letter explaining Comey’s firing, but that White House counsel Don McGahn rejected it – and so deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote a different letter (link). Mueller now has Trump’s first, unsent letter. Whatever is in it, it must be so ugly that the guy who delivered the second letter is immediately resigning from the White House.
