A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

  But there was also evidence that a third official, the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, spoke to numerous reporters about the CIA employee. By the time I became deputy attorney general, Libby had been interviewed by the FBI and admitted doing so, but said he only knew about the CIA employee from a reporter. Like Armitage, Libby maintained he was just passing gossip, not proactively disseminating the name of a covert agent. Unfortunately for Libby, the reporter Libby named, NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, had been interviewed by the FBI and said that Libby was lying. Russert hadn’t passed along the covert agent’s name to Libby. Three years later, a jury would conclude the same thing: Libby lied to the FBI.

  This was one of my early experiences in Washington of people deciding motivations based on their partisan allegiance. To Democrats, it was obvious that key members of a Republican administration were subverting justice to undermine and punish their critics. To Republicans, it was just as obvious that this was a witch hunt against people who made an inconsequential mistake. My job would make at least one of these groups, or tribes, very unhappy.

  The law prohibiting the disclosure of the identity of a covert intelligence agent required specific and evil intent. Under the relevant statute, it was not enough to show that the people who disclosed the agent’s identity were stupid or careless. We had to prove that these men knew the CIA employee was undercover and that they also knew that revealing the name was against the law. Based on what we knew to that point, it seemed unlikely that we could prove, at least beyond a reasonable doubt, that Armitage or Rove had acted with the required criminal intent in speaking with Novak and other reporters. Novak backed their story that this had been gossip or a mistake, and there was likely not enough evidence to prove otherwise.

  That put the Department of Justice in a tough spot. Though the people investigating the case were professionals, I knew that it would be very difficult, if there was insufficient evidence, for a department led by Republican John Ashcroft to credibly close an investigation against his colleagues in the same administration without recommending charges. We would also never want to bring charges just to avoid an accusation of conflict. Complicating matters was the fact that Karl Rove had managed one of John Ashcroft’s political campaigns back in his home state of Missouri before Ashcroft became attorney general. On top of that, Scooter Libby, whose conduct still needed to be sorted out, was a senior White House official with whom Ashcroft and senior Department of Justice officials interacted frequently.

  The credibility of the Department of Justice is its bedrock. The American people must see the administration of justice as independent of politics, race, class, religion, or any of the many other things that divide humans into tribes. We had to do everything we could to protect the department’s reputation for fairness and impartiality, its reservoir of trust and credibility. Ashcroft understood that, and when I met with him to discuss my recommendation that he recuse himself from the case, he agreed. I immediately appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, then serving as the United States Attorney in Chicago, as special counsel to oversee the investigation. Although Fitzgerald was a political appointee and a close friend of mine, he had a strong reputation for independence and, as the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, was far enough away not to be seen as part of the executive branch leadership. I went one step further: because I was also a senior political appointee of President Bush, I delegated to Fitzgerald all my powers as acting attorney general. I remained his supervisor, but he didn’t need to ask me for permission to take any step in the case, which emphasized the independence of the investigation.

  In December 2003, I held a press conference to announce the appointment. The Department of Justice routinely makes press announcements of significant developments in its work, including decisions to bring public charges or lawsuits, or the resolution of those cases. In matters of significant public interest, the department has long confirmed investigations and reported the completion of significant investigations without charges. Anytime a special prosecutor is named to look into the activities of a presidential administration it is big news, and, predictably, my decision was not popular at the Bush White House. A week after the announcement, I substituted for the attorney general at a cabinet meeting with the president. By tradition, the secretaries of state and defense sit flanking the president at the Cabinet Room table in the West Wing of the White House. The secretary of the treasury and the attorney general sit across the table, flanking the vice president. That meant that, as the substitute for the attorney general, I was at Vice President Dick Cheney’s left shoulder. Me, the man who had just appointed a special prosecutor to investigate his friend and most senior and trusted adviser, Scooter Libby.

  As we waited for the president, I figured I should be polite. I turned to Cheney and said, “Mr. Vice President, I’m Jim Comey from Justice.”

  Without turning to face me, he said, “I know. I’ve seen you on TV.” Cheney then locked his gaze ahead, as if I weren’t there. We waited in silence for the president. My view of the Brooklyn Bridge felt very far away.

  I had assured Fitzgerald at the outset that this was likely a five- or six-month assignment. There was some work to do, but it would be a piece of cake. He reminded me of that many times over the next four years, as he was savagely attacked by the Republicans and right-leaning media as some kind of maniacal Captain Ahab, pursuing a case that was a loser from the beginning. Fitzgerald had done exactly as I expected once he took over. He investigated to understand just who in government had spoken with the press about the CIA employee and what they were thinking when they did so. After careful examination, he ended in a place that didn’t surprise me on Armitage and Rove. But the Libby part—admittedly, a major loose end when I gave him the case—turned out to be complicated.

  Libby not only lied about his interaction with Tim Russert, claiming that he’d heard the covert agent’s name from him, but eight Bush administration officials testified that they talked to Libby about the covert agent’s name. More evidence revealed that Libby had proactively discussed the CIA employee with reporters, at the vice president’s request, to “push back” on stories critical of the administration’s basis for invading Iraq. Why Libby—an attorney who graduated from Columbia Law School—lied is not clear. Maybe he didn’t want to admit that the leak started at the vice president’s office, which would have caused political embarrassment, or he didn’t want to admit to an angry President Bush that he had been among the leakers.

  It took Fitzgerald three years of litigation to get to a place where he charged, tried, and convicted Libby of making false statements in a federal investigation, perjury, and obstruction of justice. Republican loyalists howled that he was persecuting Libby because prosecutors could never prove the underlying crime—the intentional leaking of a covert agent’s name with prior knowledge of its illegality. Of course, these were the same Republicans who passionately believed that President Bill Clinton’s lies under oath over an affair with an intern simply had to be pursued, because obstruction of justice and perjury strike at the core of our system. Meanwhile, Democrats, who six years earlier attacked the case against Bill Clinton as a silly lie about sex, had discovered in the Libby case that they cared deeply about obstruction of justice crimes—when the obstructers were Republicans.

  I would discover in the coming months that the pressures to bend the rules and to make convenient exceptions to laws when they got in the way of the president’s agenda were tempting. And it was a temptation fed by the urgency of the topic and the nature of the people around the president, people who couldn’t take the long view or understand the importance to the country of doing things the right way, no matter the inconvenience. They would be painful, exhausting lessons in the importance of institutional loyalty over expediency and politics. And more preparation for the future I couldn’t yet see.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON THE TRACKS

  If you can keep your head when all about you

&
nbsp; Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, “IF”

  IT WAS AFTER 7:00 P.M. on March 10, 2004. Another long, hard day as acting attorney general of the United States, a post I’d temporarily assumed on behalf of an ailing John Ashcroft that had put me in the center of an ugly battle with the Bush White House. It was about to get even uglier.

  My security team was driving me in an armored black Suburban, headed west on Constitution Avenue, past museums, the Washington Monument, and the South Lawn of the White House. Senior government officials are assigned protective details based on threat assessments. As the United States Attorney in Manhattan, I didn’t have one, but since 9/11 the deputy attorney general was driven in an armored Suburban and shadowed by armed Deputy U.S. Marshals.

  At the end of a long day, I was tired and ready to get home. Then my cell phone rang. On the line was David Ayres, Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief of staff. Ayres was one of those rare people who seem to grow calmer in the middle of a storm. And there was a metaphorical hurricane hitting, so his voice was stone cold. Ayres had just gotten off the phone with Janet Ashcroft, who had been keeping vigil at her husband’s bedside at George Washington University Hospital. Attorney General Ashcroft had been hospitalized with acute pancreatitis, so severe that it had immobilized him with pain in the ICU.

  Minutes earlier, Ayres reported, the White House operator had attempted to put a call through to the ailing attorney general from President Bush. I knew what this was about. So did Ayers. And so did the savvy Janet Ashcroft, who, like her husband, was a sharp and accomplished attorney.

  Janet Ashcroft had refused the call. Her husband was too sick, she said, to talk to the president. Undaunted, President Bush then told her he was sending his counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and his chief of staff, Andrew Card, to the hospital to discuss a vital matter of national security with her husband. She immediately alerted Ayres, who called me.

  After finishing the call, I spoke in an unusually sharp voice to the United States Marshals Service driver. “Ed, I need to get to George Washington Hospital immediately.” The urgency in my tone was all he needed to hit the emergency lights and begin driving as if the armored car had dropped onto a NASCAR track. From this moment forward, I was in a race—a literal race against two of the president’s most senior officials in one of the wildest, most improbable moments in my entire career.

  * * *

  The deputy attorney general job, especially in the years immediately after 9/11, was incredibly stressful. The more stressful the job, the more intentional I’ve always been about helping my team members find joy in our work. Laughter is the outward manifestation of joy, so I believe if I’m doing it right, and helping people connect to the meaning and joy in their work, there will be laughter in the workplace. Laughter is also a good indication that people aren’t taking themselves too seriously.

  When I was deputy attorney general, as part of that search for joy and fun, I sometimes engaged in a bit of staff tourism. If I was going to a large White House meeting, for example, I would look to take a member of my staff who hadn’t been there before. Usually this was a fun experience for them. Once it almost went horribly wrong.

  One of President Bush’s major initiatives involved finding ways, consistent with the law, for various departments and agencies to make grants to faith groups. Most agencies, such as the Department of Justice, had an office devoted to this faith-based initiative. In 2004, President Bush summoned the leaders of the departments to give him a report on their progress. I was attending for Justice. Shortly before the meeting, I learned that each “principal” meeting participant—which is what I was—could bring a “plus one,” meaning a staff member to support me.

  I knew our faith-based work well, so I didn’t need a plus one, but it occurred to me that Bob Trono, one of my most valuable staff members, had never been to a White House meeting. Bob had been a federal prosecutor with me in Richmond and handled the Leonidas Young case, including the prosecution of the young minister who lied for Mayor Young. I asked him to come to Washington and help me oversee the United States Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. These were vital parts of the Department of Justice but rarely got White House attention. I thought it would be fun for him to get a chance to go.

  When I suggested the idea, however, Bob wasn’t feeling it. He didn’t know anything about the faith-based efforts—literally nothing—and didn’t feel comfortable going to a briefing with the president of the United States on the subject. I replied that I would do all the talking and didn’t need his help. After further protests and reassurances, he reluctantly agreed. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I got this. I’m not going to screw you.”

  Two things, besides me, screwed Bob. First, before the faith-based meeting was to start, I was unexpectedly called to a meeting in the Situation Room at the White House that went longer than I expected. Second, President Bush, who was not with me in the Situation Room, continued his disturbing pattern of starting meetings early. This was not quite as disruptive as President Clinton’s notorious tardiness, but having a president occasionally start early meant everyone had to show up well ahead. Soon after becoming deputy attorney general, I missed a morning terrorism briefing with the president because, arriving fifteen minutes early, I decided to go to the bathroom just outside the Oval Office (known in my family as “the highest potty in the land”) and returned to find the Oval Office door already closed and the meeting under way. I had no idea what the protocol was for entering an Oval Office meeting in progress, and I was new, so I didn’t test it. I left.

  A nervous Bob found a chair against the wall in the Roosevelt Room, far back from the action. He could see an empty spot at the table where my name was spelled out on both sides of a triangular “tent card.” And true to form, George W. Bush walked into the room ahead of schedule and with a look of impatience. Poor Bob.

  Bush could be impatient, and it drove me nuts that he started things early, but I was struck by his strong, and occasionally devilish, sense of humor. That year, 2004, he was in the thick of his reelection battle against Democrat John Kerry, who was hammering him for presiding over what Kerry called a “jobless” economic recovery.

  In one of our daily morning terrorism meetings with the president, FBI director Bob Mueller told him that a suspected Al Qaeda operative named Babar, whom we were closely monitoring, had just gotten a second job in New York.

  Mueller, not known as a comedian, then paused, turned his head toward me and added, “And then Jim said…”

  Bush looked at me, and so did Vice President Cheney. I froze. Before our meeting, Mueller and I had discussed Babar’s second job and I’d made a private joke to the FBI director that I hadn’t expected to repeat to the president, who could occasionally display a temper.

  Time slowed down, way down. I didn’t reply.

  The president prompted me. “What’d you say, Jim?”

  I paused and then, horrified, plunged in. “Who says you haven’t created any jobs; this guy’s got two.”

  To my great relief, Bush laughed heartily. Cheney did not. On the way out of the Oval Office, I tugged Mueller’s arm.

  “You’re killing me,” I said with a smile. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

  “But it was funny,” he replied, with the grimace that passed for his smile. Bob was not a jokester, and his severe demeanor intimidated most people. Word at the Bureau was that he had knee surgery not long after 9/11 and declined anesthesia in favor of biting on a leather belt. But I had seen enough to know he had a dry and slightly dark sense of humor. I was seeing it now.

  “And it was also private, Bob. It was a joke between us.” He got it, although he still thought it was funny. From this distance, I can see that he was right.

  I saw the devilish side of President Bush one cold winter morning, with the city covered by a freshly fallen snow. This frigid morning, Bush was seated in his normal armchair, with his back to the firepla
ce and close to the grandfather clock. The president was apparently about to head somewhere on Marine One, so, as was the custom, reporters were bundled in their winter coats and huddled outside near the Rose Garden to record his departure.

  As I began briefing the president on a terrorism case, I could hear the sound of his approaching helicopter. The sound grew louder. Stone-faced, the president held up his hand. “Hold on a minute, Jim,” he said.

  He kept his hand aloft to pause me, turned slightly in his chair, and looked out onto the South Lawn, where the press corps was gathered. I turned to follow his gaze and watched as the descent of the helicopter swept up the snow on the ground, creating a whiteout blizzard that coated all of the reporters in snow. Some of them looked like snowmen. Embarrassed snowmen. Without any expression on his face at all, Bush turned back to me, dropping his hand. “Okay, go,” he said.

  Bush may have had a slight mean streak—he clearly enjoyed watching that scene—but he understood that humor was essential to the high-stress, high-stakes business we were in. We could be talking with deadly seriousness about terrorism one minute and then filling the Oval Office with laughter the next. It was the only way to get through the job—to intentionally inject some fun and joy into it. But in the White House that day, my friend Bob Trono found nothing joyful or humorous about his meeting with the president.

  “Who’re we waitin’ on?” Bush asked, after he entered the Roosevelt Room five minutes before the scheduled start time.

  Someone answered that Comey was downstairs in the Situation Room.

  “Jim can catch up when he gets here,” Bush said. “Let’s get going.”