What few were willing to say, at least publicly, is that a man of unimpeachable integrity is not necessarily what a president or any other political figure really wants. Someone who quotes Martin Luther and whose political philosophy was forged while reading the works of the theologian and philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, as Comey’s was, may not be the most reliable political partner.*
Comey’s comments about doing the right thing, which his wife so proudly placed on the family refrigerator, struck others as displaying “a near contempt for partisan politics,” as Daniel Klaidman wrote in Newsweek in 2013. Politics, in this view, requires often messy compromises, even of moral principles.
“There is also an undercurrent of persistent dissent about Comey,” Klaidman continued. While conceding they are a minority, albeit a powerful one, his detractors “see a gunslinging prosecutor who is cocksure and possesses an overweening sense of his own righteousness. They contend, further, that Comey took a narrow legal dispute and imbued it with high drama and grave portent in an effort to burnish his reputation. These critics say his actions reflect an unyielding, black-and-white approach to morality.”
As a former (unnamed) Bush White House official put it, “Jim has a flair for the dramatic and a desire to be the moral savior of mankind.”
This aspect of Comey seemed to become a near obsession with members of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who never missed an opportunity to excoriate Comey for, as they put in a 2013 editorial, “prosecutorial excess and bad judgment.” They harshly attacked his role in the Ashcroft affair: “The biggest of Mr. Comey’s misjudgments are the ones for which he gets the highest accolades from his media admirers.”
The Journal editorial page went so far as to compare Comey to Javert, the dogged pursuer of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. But such criticism of Comey was drowned out by the chorus of praise, both for his actions at Ashcroft’s bedside and more broadly for his efforts to keep government spying and torture within the bounds of the law.
When Mueller’s extension as FBI director finally ran out in 2013, Comey’s name remained on a short list of candidates to replace him. This time Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, called Comey himself, asking him to interview for the post. Comey told him he’d sleep on it, but the answer was likely to be no.
Comey was still cool to the idea, but several things had changed since his last discussion with Mueller: after three years at Bridgewater, he was more financially secure. He’d left the firm earlier that year and had recently joined the faculty of Columbia Law School. But his family was still living in Connecticut, and his wife was in graduate school. And surely, with his Republican résumé, he had to be considered a long shot for the post.
Comey told his wife about the call from Holder, and the next morning he found her at the computer studying real estate listings in the Washington area. “This is who you are, this is what you love,” she said of the FBI job. “So go down there and do your best.”
Comey arrived at the White House for his job interview in May. He’d never met Obama, who was physically leaner and intellectually more focused than Comey had expected. Obama told him that naming an FBI director and nominating Supreme Court justices are the most important personnel decisions a president makes, because their terms extend beyond the president’s. He said he felt there was great value in such a long tenure, in part because it helped ensure the FBI’s independence. And the FBI director would still be on hand to give Obama’s successor as president seasoned advice, something Obama would have appreciated when he was still a new and relatively untested president. What Obama said he wanted most at the FBI was “competence and independence.”
By independence, Obama meant he expected not that Comey would have no political views but rather that Comey would never let those views affect an investigation or any other aspect of his work. As Obama put it, “I need to sleep at night knowing the place is well run and the American people protected.”
That aligned perfectly with Comey’s views, so much so that maybe his Republican credentials wouldn’t bother Obama. Mueller, after all, was also a registered Republican. Comey’s being a Republican could even be seen as an advantage. If Comey were Obama’s choice, no one could accuse the president of naming a partisan loyalist.
Obama invited Comey back to the Oval Office to confirm that he was indeed his choice. “Once you are director we won’t be able to talk like this,” the president said. A president and the FBI director couldn’t be friends and confidants, but needed to keep a distance. The two had a wide-ranging conversation about thorny legal and military issues, like the propriety of drone strikes against suspected terrorists. Comey was impressed by what he considered the suppleness of Obama’s mind and his grasp of the issues.
Perhaps Obama was using the occasion to assess Comey one last time. If so, he passed muster. The president announced his appointment on a sunny June 21, 2013, in the Rose Garden, flanked by Mueller and Comey. President Obama began by lavishing praise on Mueller:
I know that everyone here joins me in saying that you will be remembered as one of the finest directors in the history of the FBI, and one of the most admired public servants of our time. And I have to say just personally not only has it been a pleasure to work with Bob, but I know very few people in public life who have shown more integrity more consistently under more pressure than Bob Mueller.
I think Bob will agree with me when I say that we have the perfect person to carry on this work in Jim Comey—a man who stands very tall for justice and the rule of law.
Obama stressed Comey’s experience and character, placing special emphasis on his integrity and independence and citing the Ashcroft incident:
To know Jim Comey is also to know his fierce independence and his deep integrity. Like Bob, he’s that rarity in Washington sometimes—he doesn’t care about politics, he only cares about getting the job done. At key moments, when it’s mattered most, he joined Bob in standing up for what he believed was right. He was prepared to give up a job he loved rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong. As Jim has said, “We know that the rule of law sets this nation apart and is its foundation.”
Jim understands that in time of crisis, we aren’t judged solely by how many plots we disrupt or how many criminals we bring to justice—we’re also judged by our commitment to the Constitution that we’ve sworn to defend, and to the values and civil liberties that we’ve pledged to protect. And as we’ve seen in recent days, this work of striking a balance between our security, but also making sure we are maintaining fidelity to those values that we cherish is a constant mission. That’s who we are.
Comey breezed through Senate confirmation hearings, attracting praise from both sides of the aisle. He was approved by a vote of 93 to 1; only the maverick Kentucky Republican Rand Paul voted against him.
Comey was sworn in as FBI director on September 4, 2013, twelve years to the day after Mueller’s ceremony.
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FROM HIS FIRST day as director, Comey put his own more relaxed stamp on the office, a distinct contrast from Mueller’s more formal, hierarchical approach. Despite their shared values, Comey was far more extroverted and open than Mueller, who was known inside the bureau as Bob “Say Nothing” Mueller.
Comey gave his attire considerable thought: Mueller had worn a white shirt every day of his twelve-year tenure. Mueller was never seen in public without his suit jacket on. For his first address to the thousands of FBI employees around the world, Comey wore a blue shirt and tie but no jacket, and sat on a stool.
At his first meeting with his senior staff, Comey pushed aside his bulky briefing books, leaned far back in his chair, and “stretched like a big cat,” as Andrew McCabe recalled. Comey worried that FBI employees worked too hard under too much stress, which could undermine sound judgment—something essential for people who had been given so muc
h power over the lives of their fellow citizens.
At one of his first staff meetings, Comey began by asking each person to tell everyone something about themselves that would surprise the others—a personal approach that was highly unorthodox at the straitlaced FBI, where most people knew little or nothing about their colleagues’ lives outside FBI headquarters. One said he loved Disney characters; another was a passionate fan of abstract art. McCabe disclosed nothing so offbeat, but revealed he’d once been a criminal defense lawyer. The ice was broken.
At subsequent meetings, Comey asked more personal questions, often pegged to the season: What was your favorite Halloween candy as a child? What’s your favorite Thanksgiving food? Your favorite holiday gift? Comey didn’t care that the questions might come across as childish. He thought children were often more honest and less guarded than adults.
McCabe appreciated Comey’s informality and felt his charm; Comey was the kind of person, as McCabe put it, who in conversation would listen so closely you felt “there were only the two of you in the whole world.” But most important to McCabe was that Comey shared Mueller’s “larger-than-life sense of rectitude.” The Ashcroft story had preceded Comey’s nomination and arrival.
When Comey took the director’s job, McCabe was working in the National Security Division after a career at the bureau that had begun in New York in 1996. A graduate of Duke and Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, McCabe had prominent roles in the FBI’s investigation of the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist bombings and, the year before, the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Then forty-five, he was exceptionally lean (even by the standards of a fitness-crazed FBI) from frequent triathlons; he often biked the thirty-five miles from his Virginia home to FBI headquarters. He wore glasses and kept his slightly graying hair cropped short.
During his first fifteen months as director, Comey visited all fifty-six domestic FBI field offices and a dozen overseas. He rarely wore a suit jacket. He asked his top staff members to abandon theirs, too. He mingled with the staff and often ate lunch in the cafeteria. He encouraged casual conversations and asked for candor from everyone who worked for him. “Tell me what you really think” was a constant request.
The effort met with mixed success. Suit jackets and ties would disappear from staff meetings, only to creep back as weeks passed, until Comey brought the issue up again. However much he talked about openness and transparency—two management attributes he had absorbed when he was at Bridgewater—the near-military hierarchy and deference to authority that were ingrained in the FBI’s culture couldn’t be changed overnight, if ever.
Still, by 2015 it could safely be said that the transition from Mueller to Comey had been a success, certainly by the most conspicuous measure, which was that there hadn’t been another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. That isn’t to say there weren’t plenty of threats to monitor and investigate, including the rise of ISIS, and controversies, like the FBI’s access to private data on cell phones—one of the thorny issues Obama had raised in his talk with Comey.
Still, in his end-of-year message, Comey warned that the FBI couldn’t become complacent. “The coming year will be difficult,” he wrote. “The threats we face are moving faster and becoming harder to see. The threat from terrorism, in particular, will likely continue to challenge us. But we are up for that challenge. In a way, it is the reason we joined the FBI. We could do easy stuff for better money elsewhere. But who wants that? We get to do hard and good.
“I also think the American people will increasingly look to us as a centering and calming force in a time of anxiety. In the midst of this, our wonderful, sometimes messy, democracy will elect a new president. We, of course, will stay out of politics and remain what the American people count on us to be—competent, honest, and independent.
“Thank you for a year of service and accomplishment. Take a deep breath and hug your families. Hard lies ahead.”
Little did he know.
* * *
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THE FBI HAD already had a taste of how “messy,” as Comey put it, American politics had become. To the frustration of many in the FBI, especially McCabe, nothing was more controversial than the bureau’s investigation of the Benghazi attacks, which, after painstaking and difficult work in a notoriously inhospitable country, Libya, had resulted in the successful conviction of the militia leader who masterminded the attack. It was McCabe’s first involvement in an intensely politicized affair, seized upon by Republicans eager to lay responsibility for the death of the U.S. ambassador and three others at the feet of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The Obama administration had fueled the fires by first claiming, erroneously, that the attack was a spontaneous demonstration triggered by an anti-Muslim video, rather than the planned terrorist assault it turned out to be. But in November, soon after Comey became director, the House Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report after an “exhaustive” investigation largely absolving President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and the intelligence agencies of any misconduct.
That didn’t deter conspiracy theorists and their sympathizers in Congress. The South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy made Benghazi a signature issue. House Speaker John Boehner had named him the head of a new select committee to investigate Benghazi even before the Intelligence Committee finished its work. (Gowdy’s was the sixth House committee to take on the task, which was all but guaranteed to keep Hillary Clinton on the defensive.)
In July 2014, Gowdy demanded that Clinton produce all her emails related to Benghazi, and his committee subpoenaed the former secretary. State Department lawyers discovered then that Clinton hadn’t used government servers for her email correspondence. She had instead used a single private device and a server located in the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York, home. The lawyers did obtain three hundred emails that referenced Benghazi from Clinton’s lawyers and turned them over to the committee.
The State Department, now being run by Secretary of State John Kerry, launched a broader investigation and reached out to Clinton as well as other former secretaries of state, asking for the return of all correspondence. Clinton’s lawyers reviewed more than sixty thousand emails. They deleted about thirty-two thousand they deemed personal and turned over about thirty thousand to the State Department, which they delivered in twelve boxes.
Two months later, in late February, State Department lawyers disclosed to the House Committee that Clinton hadn’t even had a State Department email account, and all her email correspondence as secretary of state had moved through her personal account and the Clinton server.
At this juncture, it was an open secret that Clinton was mounting a campaign for the presidency, the culmination of a decades-long ambition. In that context, the revelation that she was using a private email account and server for her State Department correspondence proved far more significant than anything the committee unearthed about Benghazi. (After two years of work and $7.8 million in expenses, the House committee produced an eight-hundred-page report that essentially reached the same conclusion as had the other investigations, which exonerated Clinton.)
It’s not clear House committee members realized at the time what a potential bombshell they had uncovered. No one on the committee made any public statements or drew attention to it. But someone with access to the information clearly realized the implications and leaked it.
On March 2, 2015, just days after the Clinton disclosures to the committee, the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt broke the news that “Hillary Clinton used personal email account at State Dept., possibly breaking rules.”
The story revealed the startling fact that Clinton had no official State Department account and that her lawyers had reviewed thirty thousand emails before choosing those that, in their view, related to Benghazi. The story raised questions about whether Clinton’s failure to archive official communications might have
violated various regulations requiring the retention of official records.
Much of that might have been dismissed as technicalities, and the Clinton response, initially, was to brush it off as no big deal. But the revelation hit Clinton in her Achilles’ heel. As the Times article pointed out, “The revelation about the private email account echoes long-standing criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.”
Still, there was nothing in the Times article to suggest anything criminal about Clinton’s use of personal email. The piece noted that the former secretary of state Colin Powell used a personal email account as well as an official one.
Though they’d known for weeks about the issue, Clinton and her entourage seemed ill-prepared for the publicity and compounded the matter by failing to explain why she would have relied only on a personal email account. Her spokesman insisted she had complied with both “the letter and spirit” of the rules, even though it seemed patently obvious she hadn’t.
As a public furor grew, fanned by a well-organized anti-Clinton faction that had been honing their tactics at least since the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals, Clinton answered reporters’ questions after a speech at the United Nations originally intended to showcase her record on women’s rights but drowned out by the focus on her emails.
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said. “There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” Whether classified information had been communicated was a far more ominous issue for Clinton than whether she’d deprived the archives of potentially historical material, because disseminating classified information was potentially a crime.
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