A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

  Director Clapper sat closest to the president-elect, with CIA Director John Brennan, NSA Director Mike Rogers, and me to his right. Against the wall behind me sat Trump’s future CIA Director Mike Pompeo and designated Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert and Deputy National Security Adviser K. T. McFarland. The president-elect’s CIA intelligence briefer—a career employee assigned to deliver regular intelligence briefings to the incoming president—was also in the room to take notes.

  By this point, I had worked relatively closely with two presidents, in addition to scores of other leaders in government. I was curious to see how Trump, the classic “fish out of water,” would operate in a totally foreign role. Running a private family-held company is, of course, quite different from running a nation—or even running a large public corporation. You have to deal with various constituencies who don’t report to you and to live under a web of laws and regulations that don’t apply to a typical CEO.

  As I’d seen from other leaders, being confident enough to be humble—comfortable in your own skin—is at the heart of effective leadership. That humility makes a whole lot of things possible, none more important than a single, humble question: “What am I missing?” Good leaders constantly worry about their limited ability to see. To rise above those limitations, good leaders exercise judgment, which is a different thing from intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem, to decipher a riddle, to master a set of facts. Judgment is the ability to orbit a problem or a set of facts and see it as it might be seen through other eyes, by observers with different biases, motives, and backgrounds. It is also the ability to take a set of facts and move it in place and time—perhaps to a hearing room or a courtroom, months or years in the future—or to the newsroom of a major publication or the boardroom of a competitor. Intelligence is the ability to collect and report what the documents and witnesses say; judgment is the ability to say what those same facts mean and what effect they will have on other audiences.

  In my first meeting with Trump, I looked to see how he struck that balance of confidence and humility and whether he showed signs of having sound judgment. I confess I was skeptical going in. My impression from the campaign was that he was a deeply insecure man, which made it impossible for him to demonstrate humility, and that he seemed very unlikely to be confident and humble enough to ask the “What am I missing” question at the heart of sound judgment. But I didn’t see enough at Trump Tower that day to see whether that assessment was correct or not. The president-elect was appropriately subdued and serious.

  Director Clapper presented the intelligence community assessment, just as he had to President Obama and the Gang of Eight. There were a few questions and comments, most of which came from Tom Bossert in the back row. During the discussion of Russia’s involvement in the election, I recall Trump listening without interrupting, and asking only one question, which was really more of a statement: “But you found there was no impact on the result, right?” Clapper replied that we had done no such analysis, which was not our business or expertise. What we could say is that we found no evidence of alteration of the vote count.

  What I found telling was what Trump and his team didn’t ask. They were about to lead a country that had been attacked by a foreign adversary, yet they had no questions about what the future Russian threat might be. Nor did they ask how the United States might prepare itself to meet that threat. Instead, with the four of us still in our seats—including two outgoing Obama appointees—the president-elect and his team shifted immediately into a strategy session about messaging on Russia. About how they could spin what we’d just told them. Speaking as if we weren’t there, Priebus began describing what a press statement about this meeting might look like. The Trump team—led by Priebus, with Pence, Spicer, and Trump jumping in—debated how to position these findings for maximum political advantage. They were keen to emphasize that there was no impact on the vote, meaning that the Russians hadn’t elected Trump. Clapper interjected to remind them of what he had said about sixty seconds earlier: the intelligence community did not analyze American politics, and we had not offered a view on that.

  I had been in many intelligence briefings with the two previous presidents and had never seen Presidents Bush or Obama discuss communications and political strategy in front of intelligence community leaders. There had always been a line. The intelligence community does facts; the White House does politics and spin, and does it on its own. The searing lesson of the Iraq war—based on bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction—was “never mix the two.” I tried to tell myself that maybe this was because Trump and his team had little experience on these matters—Trump, of course, had no experience in government whatsoever—but in an instant, the line between intelligence and politics began to fade.

  As I was sitting there, the strangest image filled my mind. I kept pushing it away because it seemed too odd and too dramatic, but it kept coming back: I thought of New York Mafia social clubs, an image from my days as a Manhattan federal prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s. The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Café Giardino. I couldn’t shake the picture. And looking back, it wasn’t as odd and dramatic as I thought it was at the time.

  The Italian Mafia, as noted earlier, called itself La Cosa Nostra—“this thing of ours”—and always drew a line between someone who was a “friend of yours,” meaning someone outside the family, and someone who was a “friend of ours,” meaning an official member of the family. I sat there thinking, Holy crap, they are trying to make each of us an “amica nostra”—friend of ours. To draw us in. As crazy as it sounds, I suddenly had the feeling that, in the blink of an eye, the president-elect was trying to make us all part of the same family and that Team Trump had made it a “thing of ours.” For my entire career, intelligence was a thing of mine and political spin a thing of yours. Team Trump wanted to change that.

  I should have said something right then. After all, I hadn’t exactly been shy when it came to asserting myself to leaders in other administrations. I’m not sure it would have made a difference, but maybe I should have told the new team about the norms of behavior, developed over generations, in fits and starts, to try to keep politics out of intelligence, to ensure that the president gets the best facts, whether he likes them or not, and to insulate the intelligence community from charges that its conclusions are politically cooked. Thinking that intelligence leaders would willingly contribute to a conversation about how to do PR in support of any presidential administration was at best a naïve notion, reflecting a misunderstanding of our role. Thinking that members of the outgoing Obama administration would be part of such an effort was just dumb.

  But in that moment, I convinced myself that speaking up would be crazy. I didn’t know these people and they didn’t know me. We had just served up “the Russians tried to get you elected.” Should I now give them a lecture about how to behave with us? And when I’m about to have a private session with the president-elect to talk about Russian hookers? Nope. Don’t think so. So I said nothing. And nobody else said anything, either. Nobody on the Trump team thought to say, “Hey, maybe this is a conversation for later,” or “Perhaps we should move on, Mr. President-Elect.”

  I actually think it was Trump who ended the communications strategy session by saying they could talk about it at another time. At that point, Reince Priebus asked if there was anything else that we should tell them.

  Here we go, I thought.

  Clapper said, “Well, yes, there is some additional sensitive material that we thought it made sense for Director Comey to review with you in a smaller group. We will excuse ourselves so he can discuss it privately with you.”

  “Okay, how small?” the president-elect asked, looking at me.

  “It’s up to you, sir,” I said, “but I was thinking the two of us.”

  Reince Priebus interjected, “How about me and the vice president–elect?”

  “That’s fine sir,” I answered, turning to the president-elect. “It
’s entirely up to you. I just didn’t want to do it with a larger group.”

  I don’t know if Trump knew what I was about to say, but the president-elect waved his hand at Priebus and then pointed at me. “Just the two of us. Thanks, everybody.”

  The group shook hands with the visitors and everyone filed out. Jeh Johnson’s words banged around my head. “Jim, please be careful. Be very careful.”

  We waited quietly while the others filed out. When we were alone, the president-elect spoke first, throwing out compliments. “You’ve had one heck of a year,” he said, adding that I handled the email investigation “honorably” and had a “great reputation.” This was nice of him to say, and there seemed to be genuine concern and appreciation in his voice. I nodded in gratitude, with a tight smile. He said that the people of the FBI “really like you” and expressed his hope that I would stay on as director.

  I replied, “I intend to, sir.”

  Though it might have been the polite or obvious thing to say to ingratiate myself with the president-elect, I didn’t thank him for saying this, because I already had the job, for a stated ten-year term, and didn’t want it to appear as if I needed to reapply. In fact, only once in the Bureau’s history was an FBI director fired before the end of his term—when Bill Clinton, without controversy, removed William Sessions in 1993 over allegations of serious ethical improprieties. Ironically, the man Clinton replaced him with, Louis Freeh, turned out to be a thorn in the administration’s side as he pressed aggressively for investigations of alleged administration misdeeds.

  After Trump finished with his opening monologue, which lasted for a minute or so, I explained the nature of the material I was about to discuss and why we thought it important that he know about it. I then began to summarize the allegation in the dossier that he had been with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013 and that the Russians had filmed the episode. I didn’t mention one particular allegation in the dossier—that he was having prostitutes urinate on each other on the very bed President Obama and the First Lady had once slept in as a way of soiling the bed. I figured that single detail was not necessary to put him on notice about the material. This whole thing was weird enough. As I spoke, I felt a strange out-of-body experience, as if I were watching myself speak to the new president about prostitutes in Russia. Before I finished, Trump interrupted sharply, with a dismissive tone. He was eager to protest that the allegations weren’t true.

  I explained that I wasn’t saying the FBI believed the allegations. We simply thought it important that he know they were out there and being widely circulated.

  I added that one of the FBI’s jobs is to protect the presidency from any kind of coercion, and, whether or not the allegations were true, it was important that he know Russians might be saying such things. I stressed that we did not want to keep information from him, particularly given that the press was about to report it.

  He again strongly denied the allegations, asking—rhetorically, I assumed—whether he seemed like a guy who needed the services of prostitutes.

  He then began discussing cases where women had accused him of sexual assault, a subject I had not raised. He mentioned a number of women, and seemed to have memorized their allegations. As he began to grow more defensive and the conversation teetered toward disaster, on instinct, I pulled the tool from my bag: “We are not investigating you, sir.” That seemed to quiet him.

  My job done, the conversation ended, we shook hands and I left the conference room. The entire private session took about five minutes, and now I was away, retracing my steps to go out the back entrance. The other directors had gone ahead. On the way down the hall I passed two men in winter coats coming the other way. One looked familiar, but I kept walking. When he was past me, he called, “Director Comey?” and I stopped and turned. Jared Kushner introduced himself, we shook hands, and I continued on my way.

  I walked out the side door, stepped into the armored car, and headed to the Manhattan FBI office to do what I loved. I walked floor upon floor of FBI offices and cubicles, thanking incredible people for their work. After the uncomfortable conversation I’d just had, it was like taking a shower.

  On January 10, four days after my meeting with Trump, the online publication BuzzFeed published in full the thirty-five-page dossier that I had briefed Trump on. The article began:

  A dossier making explosive—but unverified—allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks. The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians.

  In response, the president-elect tweeted: “FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!”

  The following day, January 11, I had another conversation with the future president. In three years working under President Obama, I had never spoken to him on the phone and only talked to him alone in person twice. Yet here I was, still in the Obama administration, standing at my FBI headquarters office window, having my second private conversation with Donald Trump in five days. Below me, as I held the phone to my ear, I could see cars moving on a darkened Pennsylvania Avenue. Across the street, the Justice Department was aglow with busy offices. I remember looking up and to my right at the brightly lit Washington Monument. I could see it rising high above the new Trump hotel that had just been opened on Pennsylvania Avenue, walking distance from the White House.

  President-Elect Trump was calling from New York. He started the call by again praising me, which now seemed like a conversational device rather than a sincere expression of approval. He added, “I sure hope you are going to stay.” I assured him, again, that I was staying at the FBI.

  He then moved to the purpose of the call. He said he was very concerned about the “leaking” of the Russian “dossier” and how it happened. I wasn’t sure if he was implying that a federal agency had leaked it, so I explained that the dossier was not a government document. It had been compiled by private parties and then given to many people, including in Congress and the press. The FBI hadn’t asked that it be created or paid for it to be created. The document was not classified and not a government document, so it wasn’t really correct that it had been “leaked.”

  He then said he had been thinking more about the part I had briefed him about privately at Trump Tower. He had been talking to people who had gone with him on the trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe 2013 pageant. He now recalled that he had not even stayed overnight in Moscow. He claimed he had flown from New York, had only gone to the hotel to change his clothes, and had flown home that same night. And then he surprised me by bringing up the one allegation I had specifically tried not to discuss with him.

  “Another reason you know this isn’t true: I’m a germophobe. There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”

  I actually let out an audible laugh. I decided not to tell him that the activity alleged did not seem to require either an overnight stay or even being in close proximity to the participants. In fact, though I didn’t know for sure, I imagined the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow was large enough for a germophobe to be at a safe distance from the activity. I thought all of that and said none of it.

  Instead, I stared out at the monuments and wondered what had happened to me and our country that the FBI director was talking about this with our incoming president. Having delivered his defense on a subject I didn’t care about, for the second time, the president-elect ended the call. I went to find my chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, to tell him the world had gone crazy and I was caught in the middle of it.

  It stayed crazy.

  CHAPTER 13

  TESTS OF LOYALTY

  Friendship, connections,
family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience—this was the glue that held us together.

  —MAFIA BOSS JOSEPH BONANNO, IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MAN OF HONOR

  DONALD J. TRUMP WAS inaugurated the forty-fifth president of the United States on January 20, 2017, before a crowd whose number immediately and famously came into dispute. The new president was determined to demonstrate that the number of spectators who turned out for him, which was sizable, surpassed the number of people present for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. They did not. No evidence, photographic or otherwise, would move him off his view, which, as far as everyone but his press team seemed to agree, was simply false. This small moment was deeply disconcerting to those of us in the business of trying to find the truth, whether in a criminal investigation or in assessing the plans and intentions of America’s adversaries. Much of life is ambiguous and subject to interpretation, but there are things that are objectively, verifiably either true or false. It was simply not true that the biggest crowd in history attended the inauguration, as he asserted, or even that Trump’s crowd was bigger than Obama’s. To say otherwise was not to offer an opinion, a view, a perspective. It was a lie.