A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

  On Sunday night, October 30, I received an email from the attorney general, asking if she could meet with me privately after our Monday morning intelligence briefing at FBI headquarters.

  “Of course,” I replied.

  As the briefing drew to a close, the attorney general, in front of the full conference room of our staffs, asked if she could meet with me. Which was a little odd, since I’d already agreed to the private meeting over email. But our staffs all noticed her request, which I suppose was the point. We went into a private office reserved for the attorney general, just off the morning briefing room. Her staff and mine waited outside, and we were finally alone.

  During the last few days, the outcry in the media had been so intense, especially and understandably among supporters of Hillary Clinton, that I didn’t know what I was about to hear from Loretta Lynch. Was she going to scream at me? Threaten me? Warn me? Deliver a message from the president? Everyone in the Obama administration almost certainly was angry at me and fearful that I’d jeopardized Clinton’s election. I had every reason to believe that Loretta was among that group.

  I walked into the room first. I turned and waited as the attorney general closed the door. She then turned, lowered her head, and walked toward me with arms out wide. This was awkward in a number of respects. Perhaps mostly because I am about eighteen inches taller than Loretta Lynch. When our bodies came together, her face went into my solar plexus as she wrapped her arms around me. I reached down and pressed both forearms, also awkwardly, against her back.

  “I thought you needed a hug,” she said as we separated. She was probably right. Although I’m not a hugger by nature, I felt physically beaten after the last few days. I also probably looked that way.

  She then sat down on the couch and gestured for me to sit in an armchair near her. “How are you doing?” she asked. I detected genuine concern in her voice.

  I told her this had been a nightmare. I explained how I saw the choices I faced and that “really bad” was better than “catastrophic.” And then she floored me with another surprise.

  “Would they feel better if it leaked on November 4?” she asked, referring to the Friday before the election.

  “Exactly, Loretta,” I answered.

  I hadn’t made my decision based on the prospect of a leak, but she was right. Once Justice approved the search warrant, it was likely the world would find out we had restarted the investigation anyhow, and we would look dishonest. Was she telling me I had done the right thing? Was she in some way thanking me for taking this brutal hit? She wasn’t going to answer those questions for me.

  Moments later, our conversation concluded. Loretta rose and reached for the door, but paused. Turning her head slightly toward me, she said, with just the slightest hint of a smile, “Try to look beat up.” She had told somebody she was going to chew me out for what I had done. What a world.

  I found the whole nightmare very painful. So much so that it actually made me a bit numb. Even people who liked me were confused by what I had done. Many others were downright nasty. I understood. My wife, who wanted Hillary Clinton to be elected the first woman president, was mostly concerned that I was back in the middle again. She said she understood why I did what I did, but resented the fact that I had to stand out front and take another hit. “It’s like you keep stepping in front of the institution to get shot,” she said. “I get it, but I wish it wasn’t you, and I wish other people would get it.”

  Emotions were extraordinarily raw, and it looked like the FBI had just put a finger on the scale for Donald Trump. And there was no hearing, no press conference, no chance to explain why we were doing what we were doing or to add anything to the letter we’d sent. Because we didn’t know what we had and what we might find, any further public statement would be inherently limited and misleading and only add confusion and damage the FBI. For that reason, we chose the wording in my letter carefully:

  In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.

  Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.

  Early the next week, while the Weiner laptop email review was under way, I attended a meeting in the White House Situation Room. As I walked down the White House halls and even when I was sitting in the meeting room, I felt like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, where (spoiler alert) he doesn’t realize he’s dead. I imagined I could see my breath as I sat around the Sit Room table. Only Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan acknowledged me, each coming to me in the hallway as I waited for the meeting to start, putting a hand on my arm, and urging me to hang in there. With those two exceptions, nobody else in the room even met my eye.

  Jim Clapper was the leader I admired most in government. His bald head and grouchy, deep, often mumbling voice masked a person who almost perfectly embodied the balances of kindness and toughness, confidence and humility. As the leader of the FBI, which is part of the American intelligence community, I reported to Director Clapper as well as the attorney general. I had come to treasure our quarterly evening meetings—“vespers,” he called them—where we would sit in a secure room at his office and talk about work and life. Joined by our deputies, we would hoist wine for me, a vodka martini with two olives for him, and I would learn from someone who had led for nearly as long as I had been alive. To seal our friendship, I regifted to him a tie my brother-in-law had given me. It was solid red and decorated with little martini glasses. Because we considered ourselves people of integrity, I disclosed it was a regift as I handed him the tie. Clapper would invariably change into the martini tie for our vespers.

  As we headed into the final week before the election, I checked on the Midyear team every day. They were working constantly, reading hundreds of new Clinton emails that we had never seen before. In a huge breakthrough, one I had been assured was not possible, the wizards at the FBI’s Operational Technology Division figured out a way to do some of the de-duplicating electronically so agents and analysts didn’t need to read hundreds of thousands of emails. Commercially available software wouldn’t work for us. But the custom software program cut it down to mere thousands, which they read night after night. Despite what the team had told me on October 27, there might be a way after all to finish the review before the election.

  On November 5, the Saturday before the election, the team told me they would be finished reviewing emails by the next morning and would be prepared to meet with me to offer their views. We met Sunday morning, two days before the election. There were indeed thousands of new Clinton emails from the BlackBerry domain, but none from the relevant time period. There were new work-related emails to and from Secretary Clinton. There were emails with classified content, but none of it was new to us. None of the new emails changed their view of the case. I pressed and pressed, wanting to be sure this wasn’t their fatigue talking. No, they pushed back, we are tired, but we are also sure this is the right answer.

  We then began debating what to do next. The group’s overall view was that, having written to Congress on October 28, I was obligated to write to Congress again. There was one dissenter. The head of the National Security Branch of the FBI argued that it was just too late to speak again. He didn’t offer much reasoning, only that he thought it was simply too close to the election. I think he was reacting to the pain our first letter had caused. We listened, kicked it around for a while, and decided we had to write to Congress again. If our rule in this unique
context—Speak or Conceal—was to be as transparent as possible about the Bureau’s activities, then it made no sense to act any differently on November 6 than we had on October 28. As before, we offered the Department of Justice senior staff the chance to edit my draft letter, and they gave us suggestions.

  On Sunday, November 6, we sent a short letter to Congress informing them that the Clinton investigation was complete and our view had not changed. We didn’t consider further public statement because it could only add more confusion two days before the election were I to stand before cameras to talk about what we found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. For reasons I couldn’t yet explain, the FBI found that Weiner’s laptop contained large numbers of new work-related Clinton emails (after she had previously claimed to have produced all work-related emails to the State Department) and also many of the emails we had seen previously about classified topics. The team had additional investigative work to do with respect to Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner to figure out how they ended up with classified emails. Better, we concluded, to mirror the first notification to Congress with a similarly short closing notification. There was no time to send an email to the FBI workforce; they would hear about it on the news before turning on their computers Monday morning. The FBI had chosen not to conceal important information from Congress and the American people, and we had worked incredibly hard to competently close the case prior to Election Day. I thanked the Midyear team, telling them I had never worked with a finer group of people and that they had helped me deal with really hard problems in a great way.

  That night, Patrice and I and one of our girls went out to a local Tex-Mex restaurant. The news about the second letter, closing the case again, was everywhere. A patron walked past my table and whispered, “Go Hillary.” I was too tired to care. I wasn’t going to vote. I didn’t want anything more to do with the whole thing. I was deeply sorry we were part of it. I wanted a drink, so I had a delicious margarita on the rocks with salt, and even that made the news: The Washington Post reported that I was spotted drinking a “giant” margarita.

  * * *

  I have spent a great deal of time looking back at 2016. And even though hindsight doesn’t always offer a perfect view, it offers a unique and valuable perspective.

  Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me. It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.

  I have seen and read reports that Hillary Clinton blames me, at least in part, for her surprising election defeat. I know that at one point in her book she wrote that she felt she’d been “shivved” by me. She had worked for much of her professional life to become the first woman president of the United States, and quite understandably that loss, as unexpected and unpredicted as it was, hurt her badly. I have read she has felt anger toward me personally, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do a better job explaining to her and her supporters why I made the decisions I made. I also know many Democrats are similarly baffled—even outraged—by the actions I took.

  After the election, I attended a classified briefing with a group of senators from both parties. Toward the end of our meeting, which was not about Hillary Clinton’s emails, one of the Democrats, then–Senator Al Franken, blurted out what probably many were thinking. He said he wanted to address “the elephant in the room,” which was “what you did to Hillary Clinton.” I asked Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who was also present, whether I could have an opportunity to respond to that. With a tone that seemed close to enjoyment, McConnell sat back and said, “Sure. Take all the time you need.”

  What I said to the senators gathered was that I wished they could go back in time with me and look at what happened from my perspective—from the FBI’s perspective. “Come with me to October 28,” I said. Even if I couldn’t persuade them that I made the right decision, I hoped that at least I could explain what I was thinking, the doors I saw, and why I chose the one labeled “Speak” rather than the one labeled “Conceal.” I didn’t handle everything in the investigation perfectly, but I did my best with the facts before me. That was the point I was trying to convey that day, and I convinced at least one person in attendance. When I finished speaking, Senator Chuck Schumer came up to me. With tears in his eyes, he grabbed my hand with one of his and reached out with the other hand to repeatedly tap the center of my chest. “I know you,” he said. “I know you. You were in an impossible position.”

  I hope very much that what we did—what I did—wasn’t a deciding factor in the election. I say that with a wife and daughters who voted for Hillary Clinton and walked in the 2017 Women’s March in D.C. the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. As I said in testimony, the very idea that my decision had any impact on the outcome leaves me feeling mildly nauseous (or, as one of my grammatically minded daughters later corrected me, “nauseated”). That’s not because Donald Trump is such a deeply flawed person and leader (so flawed that he likely misunderstood what I meant when I testified that the notion of impact on the election left me “mildly nauseous”). It leaves me feeling sick because I have devoted my life to serving institutions I love precisely because they play no role in politics, because they operate independently of the passions of the electoral process. But 2016 was an election like no other. One of my kids showed me a tweet that seemed to capture the feelings at the time. It said, “That Comey is such a political hack. I just can’t figure out which party.”

  I don’t like being criticized, but I have to pay attention to the criticism because all human beings can be wrong sometimes. Still, to avoid being paralyzed and crushed by second-guessing, I use a rule of thumb: if the criticism is coming from a person I know to be thoughtful, I pay close attention to it. I even pay attention to anonymous critics and even savage partisans if their logic or factual presentation tell me they may be seeing something I missed. The rest of the crazies, and there were a lot of crazies, I ignore.

  The stuff that gets me the most is the claim that I am in love with my own righteousness, my own virtue. I have long worried about my ego. I am proud of the fact that I try to do the right thing. I am proud of the fact that I try to be truthful and transparent. I do think my way is better than that of the lying partisans who crowd our public life today. But there is danger that all that pride can make me blind and closed off to other views of what the right thing is.

  I have replayed the Clinton email case hundreds of times in my mind. Other than mistakes in the way I presented myself in the July 5 public statement in front of the television cameras, I am convinced that if I could do it all again, I would do the same thing, given my role and what I knew at the time. But I also think reasonable people might well have handled it differently.

  For example, had I been a Democrat who had served in prior Democratic administrations, I’m not sure stepping away from the attorney general for the July 5 announcement would have been a helpful option. If I had a Democratic pedigree, I would have been painted as a conflicted partisan, and I would not have been able to credibly step away from the Justice political leadership to represent the institution independently. Of course, even an FBI director with a Democratic pedigree who didn’t make a separate announcement would have faced the same decision to speak or conceal in late October because he or she would have informed Congress, in some fashion, that the investigation was completed in July.

  Had I not served so long in the Department of Justice and led the organization in the Bush administration, I don’t know that I would have felt t
he need to protect more than the FBI. I also don’t know that I would have had the nerve to step away from the attorney general if I hadn’t seen the negative side of deferring—about torture—in my last days as deputy attorney general in 2005. My public speaking experience also made it an option to do a live press conference. Another director, with different experiences behind him, might have deferred to Justice, letting that institution sort out its issues.

  A different FBI director might have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor in late June, after Bill Clinton’s visit to the attorney general’s plane. I still think that would have been unfair to Hillary Clinton, but I can imagine another director doing it that way rather than trying to protect the institutions in the way I did.

  Another person might have decided to wait to see what the investigators could see once they got a search warrant for the Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer. That’s a tricky one, because the Midyear team was saying there was no way to complete the review before the election, but I could imagine another director deciding to gamble a bit by investigating secretly in the week before the election. That, of course, walks into Loretta Lynch’s point after our awkward hug. Had I not said something, what was the prospect of a leak during that week? Pretty high. Although the Midyear team had proven itself leakproof through a year of investigation, people in the criminal investigation section of the FBI in New York knew something was going on that touched Hillary Clinton, and a search warrant was a big step. The circle was now larger than it had ever been, and included New York, where we’d had Clinton-related leaks in prior months. Concealing the new investigation and then having it leak right before the election might have been even worse, if worse can be imagined. But a reasonable person might have done it.