It's not exactly a secret that James Comey's job was on the line since
Donald Trump entered the White House in January. No one can deny that there's a political motivation in the works, which does no service to we the people, but that's only the tip of the iceberg here. While it's a fact that in no way should we back any attempt by President Trump to politicize the Justice Department, we need to bear in mind that there's another layer of government commonly known as the unofficial "Fourth Branch" (aka the Intelligence Community/Deep State) that was looking for any excuse to get the President to fire Comey.
There are a couple of reasons behind this theory. For starters, he bungled an attempted cover-up that actually began inside
The Obama White House regarding
Hillary Clinton's emails. In addition, there's the investigation into possible collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia in last year's election. The latter reason had to do with possibly exposing the propaganda/misinformation campaign meant to discredit the President from the very first day he entered office.
In terms of politicization, there's no effort to hide the Trump Administration's intent on using the Justice Department to silence many of its most vocal political opponents. That's been a common theme from day 1. How this ties to Comey is his failed effort trying to maintain the FBI's non-partisan integrity. He was set up to be the fall-guy should anything come to light regarding both Russiagate and Emailgate. Comey's refusal to let partisan politics to take precedence over the FBI's sole duty to enforce federal law is what partially led to his ousting. That may have contributed to his ouster, and is part of a long pattern that the Trump Administration has been following over the past few months. There's no question that some of the reason is a way of covering up any potentially questionable ties that many of Trump's closest advisors may have had before he entered office.
Another factor to bear in mind is that Trump has slowly been turning the Justice Department into his personal secret police force to go after anyone (especially those who are public figures) that opposes him politically. As opposition hardens, he's going to get much more violent in his response. Think of Richard Nixon's presidency when J. Edgar Hoover was the FBI Director. That's what we're going to be looking at. However, unlike under Nixon,
The Democrats have been lackluster in their response to Trump's maneuvers. The disarray in the party today in 2017 is much worse than it was back in 1969.