Donald Trump is facing the deepest crisis of his presidency after contents of a memo written by James Comey when he was FBI director surfaced Tuesday, alleging that the president asked him to drop an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

The White House was already on the defensive over the president’s firing of Comey a week ago and over a report Monday that Trump disclosed sensitive intelligence to Russian officials. Then another political bombshell exploded Tuesday night.

After a conversation Comey had with Trump in February, a day after Flynn was ousted for what the White House said were misleading accounts of his conversations with Russia’s U.S. ambassador, the FBI director wrote a memo documenting the Oval Office meeting. In it, Comey said the president asked him to abandon the Flynn investigation, according to a person who was given a copy of the memo and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I hope you can let this go,” Trump told the FBI director, according to the memo as cited by the New York Times, which first reported its existence. The contents of the memo have subsequently been confirmed by other news organizations, including Bloomberg, although the memo itself has not yet surfaced publicly.

The revelation raised questions about whether the president sought to influence the FBI at the same time the agency is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Moscow by Trump associates. The memo’s emergence, after Trump fired Comey, had congressional Democrats raising the specter that the president engaged in obstruction of justice, an impeachable offense.

David Fuller's view

If Trump is proven to have committed an impeachable offence, and preliminary evidence suggests he may have, Republicans should join Democrats and remove him from office without further delay.

Trump is the problem because he creates his own crises in the manner of an impulsive, unreliable and unpredictable king, rather than the President of the United States.  This is obviously bad for America and also Democracy in the eyes of all those who look to the USA for positive leadership.

I don’t think this problem will blow over, even if James Comey’s testimony proves to be inconclusive.  Trump is unlikely to change and even his Cabinet will have lost confidence in him. 

Today’s downward dynamics by US stock market indices (see Eoin’s review below) will have capped most rallies for at least the near term. Clearly, we have the grounds for a global stock market correction.

If we learn that there are clear, irrefutable grounds for Trump’s impeachment, this process would require a majority vote in the House of Congress and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. 

Republicans have a narrow majority in the Senate so evidence against Trump would have to be conclusive.  If so, Republicans would favour a quick impeachment to have any chance of limiting damage in the November 2018 mid-term elections.  It would obviously help if they had time to rescue Trump’s fiscal spending and tax cut plans, which have now been knocked further into the long grass.

My guess is that if / when Trump is impeached, that would create the conditions for the US stock market to rally back into new high ground. 

Meanwhile, we can be sure people are already writing and composing their versions of the King Trump book, play, musical and best of all, opera.