by James Comey
Two days later, on Sunday, January 22, I attended a late-afternoon reception at the White House for the leaders of the various law enforcement agencies who had provided security and support for the inaugural activities. The FBI’s counterterrorism, intelligence, and SWAT capabilities had been deployed that day, closely integrated with the Secret Service, as they are for every inauguration. I was told President Trump wanted to thank the agencies for all their hard work. This struck me as a really nice thing for the president to do. Despite that, I didn’t love the idea of going personally, for a couple of reasons.
First, I didn’t think it would be helpful for the FBI if I were seen in videos or photographs hanging around with the new president. Given that so many people seemed to think I’d helped to elect him, it made little sense to support a false narrative that I, and by inference the Bureau, was somehow close to President Trump. Second, the NFL conference championship games were on TV. The 5:00 P.M. reception would cause me to miss the end of the Packers against the Falcons and the beginning of the Steelers against the Patriots. Was the new president not a football fan?
But my staff argued that it was important for me to go. I was the FBI director. I didn’t want to insult the other leaders or the new administration by not showing up. And I told myself my concerns were overblown. This would be a group reception, and that meant no individual press pictures of me with the president. Also, I decided to record the football games on my DVR and avoid any conversation about the scores until I had a chance to watch. So I went to the White House.
Just as I’d hoped, the reception began as a pleasant mingling with the law enforcement leaders from local, state, and federal agencies. There were about thirty of us there, including leaders from the United States Capitol Police, the Washington Metropolitan Police, and the United States Park Police. These people and their agencies were long-standing partners of the FBI, and many of us knew each other from that work. We gathered in the large oval Blue Room in the Residence of the White House. At the edges of the room, the White House staff had set up small tables with finger foods and nonalcoholic drinks. I moved around the room shaking hands and thanking folks for their work with the FBI.
I was preoccupied about keeping a healthy distance from Trump. So I figured out which way the president would likely enter the room and mingled my way to the opposite end, by the windows looking over the South Lawn toward the Washington Monument. I couldn’t get farther away without climbing out of the window, an option that would begin to look more appealing as time went by.
Feeling safe at the far end of the room, I settled next to Joe Clancy, the director of the Secret Service. Clancy, a former head of the Presidential Protective Division, had been called out of retirement by President Obama to lead the troubled agency. His wife remained in Philadelphia, so I inquired after her and their daughter, whom I’d seen sing at a ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the Secret Service. I often joked that the Secret Service was an older sibling to the FBI, which was only a century old, and its agents had trained our first special agents.
Clancy is a wonderful, warm, down-to-earth person. As he and I were chatting, the double doors opened and White House staffers entered with tall klieg lights, setting them up to illuminate the area farthest from me, by the doors. I had guessed the location of the president’s entrance correctly. But I worried that the bright lights meant there would be cameras and reporters, which struck me as unusual for an event to thank low-key law enforcement officials. Moments later, the president and vice president entered. A crush of photographers and TV cameras were ushered in and encircled the two men.
The president began speaking, and his eyes swept the room at the leaders, who were spread around the perimeter. His gaze passed me, mercifully, and instead came to rest on Joe Clancy. He called Joe’s name and motioned him across the room to join him and the vice president. Joe never seeks the spotlight, but he dutifully walked into the near-blinding glow of TV lights. The president hugged him, awkwardly, and asked him to stand with him and the vice president, as if on display.
Trump then continued talking, looking to his left and away from me. I couldn’t believe my luck. He hadn’t seen me! How is that possible? Then it occurred to me. I was standing against a heavy blue curtain. I was wearing a blue suit that didn’t match the curtain exactly, but was pretty close. It must be camouflaging me! How great is that? I was thinking, I’m so lucky they held the event in this room, because I didn’t have suits that blend in the Green or Red Rooms. Now that it was my salvation, I moved even closer to the curtain, pressing my back against it, desperately trying to erase myself from the president’s field of vision. I literally clung to the blue curtain, all in the hope that I could avoid an ill-advised and totally awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States.
My curtain call worked.
Until it didn’t.
Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me.
“Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome.
My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.”
The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir.
Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse.
President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room.
The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect.
It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It
was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.
* * *
On Friday, January 27, 2017—twenty-one days into my relationship with Donald Trump—I was back at the White House. I had been eating my lunch at my desk, as usual, when my assistant Althea James connected a woman calling from the White House and telling me to hold for the president. He came on the line to ask if I “wanted to come over for dinner” that night. This was not normal, but I felt like I had no choice. I replied, “Of course, sir.” He asked whether six or six thirty would be better. I said, “Whatever works for you, sir.” He chose six thirty. I hung up and then called Patrice, to break a Thai food dinner date.
That afternoon I saw the recently retired director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper, at an event at the FBI, where we were awarding him the rare status of Honorary Special Agent. As we stood waiting to walk onstage, I told him about the dinner invitation, explaining that it made me deeply uncomfortable. He assumed it would be a group event, saying he had heard others were being invited to dinner at the White House. That made me relax a bit.
There was no way a president would be dining alone with the FBI director. Someone at the White House had to have told him that it just wasn’t done, at least not since the days of Nixon and Hoover. I recalled when President Obama invited me to the White House for a wide-ranging conversation before I was nominated because, as he explained, “Once you are director, we won’t be able to talk like this,” meaning he would not be able to debate wide-ranging philosophical issues with me. The head of the FBI could not be put into the position of meeting and chatting privately with the president of the United States—especially after an election like 2016. The very notion would compromise the Bureau’s hard-won integrity and independence. My fear was that Trump expected exactly that.
I arrived at the White House on West Executive Drive, the small roadway between the basement entrance to the White House and the Old Executive Office Building. The FBI security team stopped the vehicle at the same awning-covered entrance I used to go to the Situation Room. I walked in and told the Secret Service officer on duty that I was here for dinner with the president. He looked slightly confused and asked me to have a seat. Shortly thereafter, a young woman escorted me on the long walk through the West Wing, along the Rose Garden and into the ground floor of the White House Residence. She took me up a staircase I had never seen before, which emptied next to the Green Room on the main floor.
As I waited in the doorway, I chatted with two navy stewards while discreetly looking around for the president’s other dinner guests. The stewards were African American men, close to my age, and had been working at the White House for about ten years. They were each well over six feet tall, and yet both had worked on submarines during their active-duty years. Naturally, this led to a conversation about the headroom on subs, and one reported that the bunks were six feet, four inches long, which was precisely his height. Chuckling, we agreed a submarine was no place for me. Standing at the entrance to the Green Room, as we continued waiting and chatting, I saw it—a table unmistakably set for two. One place setting was marked with a calligraphy card reading, “Director Comey.” The other spot, presumably, was for the president. I was deeply uncomfortable, and not just because I did not love the idea of a third discussion of Russian hookers.
The president arrived at the appointed time of 6:30 P.M. The compliments soon followed. Seeing me already standing in the doorway, he said, “I like that. I like people who are on time. I think a leader should always be on time.”
He was wearing his usual dark blue suit, white shirt, and too-long red tie. He did not speak to the stewards at all. He gestured me to the table, which sat us about four feet apart and was placed directly beneath the ornate chandelier in the center of the rectangular room.
As the name suggests, the walls of the Green Room are covered in silk fabric of that color. I read afterward that John Adams used it as a bedroom and Thomas Jefferson made it a dining room, but presidents since have used it as a sitting room. That evening the furniture had been removed in favor of our small dining table. Over the president’s right shoulder, I could see one of two statues that stand on either side of the fireplace, the white marble mantelpiece resting on their heads, which looked really painful.
On my plate, I had found a large cream-colored card describing the entire four-course menu in cursive script. Salad, shrimp scampi, chicken parmesan with pasta, and vanilla ice cream. The president began by admiring his own menu card, which he held up.
“They write these things out one at a time, by hand,” he marveled, referring to the White House staff.
“A calligrapher,” I replied, nodding.
He looked quizzical. “They write them by hand,” he repeated.
At some point early on, maybe by the time the navy stewards brought us the shrimp scampi, Trump asked bluntly, “So what do you want to do?” It was an odd question that I didn’t entirely understand at first, but without waiting for an answer, he launched into a monologue that made it crystal clear what he was referring to: whether I wanted to keep my job.
He said lots of people wanted to be director of the FBI, but that he thought very highly of me. He said he had heard great things about me and knew the people of the FBI thought very highly of me as well. He said despite that, he would understand if I wanted to “walk away” given all I had been through, although then he noted that that would be bad for me personally because it would look like I had done something wrong. He finished by saying that he knew he could “make a change at FBI” if he wanted to, but that he wanted to know what I thought.
Now it was pretty clear to me what was happening. The setup of the dinner, both the physical layout of a private meal and Trump’s pretense that he had not already asked me to stay on multiple occasions, convinced me this was an effort to establish a patronage relationship. Somebody probably had told him, or maybe it just occurred to him at random, that he’d “given” me the job for “free” and that he needed to get something in return. This only added to the strangeness of the experience. The president of the United States had invited me to dinner and decided my job security was on the menu.
I responded that I agreed he can fire the FBI director any time he wishes, but that I wanted to stay and do a job I loved and thought I was doing well. I said I hadn’t expected to return to government but found the job hugely rewarding and wanted to serve out my term. Sensing that he needed more from me, I added that he could count on me as being “reliable” in one way. Not in the way political people sometimes use the term—like a “reliable” vote for one team. I said he could count on me to always tell him the truth.
I didn’t do sneaky things, I told him, and I don’t leak. But, I said, I am not on anybody’s side politically and could not be counted on in the traditional political sense, explaining that that was in the president’s best interest. The FBI and the Department of Justice are drawn into the most controversial investigations in the country, investigations that frequently involve prominent members of a presidential administration, as we had been with the investigation of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby during the Bush administration. The FBI is able to do that work credibly because it is not—and is not seen as—a tool of the president. Without that reputation and reality at both Justice and the FBI, a president is left with no way to resolve investigations of his administration, short of appointment of some kind of special prosecutor.
This discourse obviously did not appease him. A short time later, with a serious look on his face, he said, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.”
During the silence that followed, I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way. The president of the United States just demanded the FBI director’s loyalty. This was surreal. To those inclined to defend T
rump, they might consider how it would have looked if President Obama had called the FBI director to a one-on-one dinner during an investigation of senior officials in his administration, then discussed his job security, and then said he expected loyalty. There would undoubtedly be people appearing on Fox News calling for Obama’s impeachment in an instant. This, of course, was not something I could ever conceive of Obama doing, or George W. Bush, for that matter. To my mind, the demand was like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony—with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a “made man.” I did not, and would never. I was determined not to give the president any hint of assent to this demand, so I gave silence instead. We looked at each other for what seemed an eternity, but was maybe two seconds or so. I stared again at the soft white pouches under his expressionless blue eyes. I remember thinking in that moment that the president doesn’t understand the FBI’s role in American life or care about what the people there spent forty years building. Not at all.
In an earlier time in my career and at a younger age, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to keep my composure, to not break the icy stare with a nod or some muffled word, signaling agreement. Even at the age of fifty-six, with a fair number of scars, and in my fourth year as director of the FBI, I still had to talk to myself as I sat inches from the president, staring him directly in the face. The voice inside said, “Don’t do anything; don’t you dare move.”
Trump broke the awkward standoff, looking down at his plate and moving to another topic. My cold response didn’t seem to faze him much, if at all. Dinner continued, pleasantly enough.
