A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

  He talked about the trappings of the White House, saying something to the effect of “This is luxury. And I know luxury.” I remember glancing again at the one poor statue I could see over his shoulder with the mantelpiece on its head and thinking that made sense. He went into another explanation—I’d seen many of them on television—about how he hadn’t made fun of a disabled reporter. He said he hadn’t mistreated a long list of women, reviewing each case in detail, as he had in our earlier conversation. There was no way he groped that lady sitting next to him on the airplane, he insisted. And the idea that he grabbed a porn star and offered her money to come to his room was preposterous. His method of speaking was like an oral jigsaw puzzle contest, with a shot clock. He would, in rapid-fire sequence, pick up a piece, put it down, pick up an unrelated piece, put it down, return to the original piece, on and on. But it was always him picking up the pieces and putting them down. None of this behavior, incidentally, was the way a leader could or should build rapport with a subordinate.

  All of us struggle to realize something Patrice spent years telling me, as I took on one position or another: “It’s not about you, dear.” She often needed to remind me that, whatever people were feeling—happy, sad, frightened, or confused—it was unlikely it had anything to do with me. They had received a gift, or lost a friend, or gotten a medical test result, or couldn’t understand why their love wasn’t calling them back. It was all about their lives, their troubles, their hopes and dreams. Not mine. The nature of human existence makes it hard for us—or at least for me—to come to that understanding naturally. After all, I can only experience the world through me. That tempts all of us to believe everything we think, everything we hear, everything we see, is all about us. I think we all do this.

  But a leader constantly has to train him- or herself to think otherwise. This is an important insight for a leader, in two respects. First, it allows you to relax a bit, secure in the knowledge that you aren’t that important. Second, knowing people aren’t always focused on you should drive you to try to imagine what they are focused on. I see this as the heart of emotional intelligence, the ability to imagine the feelings and perspective of another “me.” Some seem to be born with a larger initial deposit of emotional intelligence, but all of us can develop it with practice. Well, most of us. I got the sense that no one ever taught this to Donald Trump.

  The president asked very few questions that might prompt a discussion. Instead he made constant assertions, leaving me wondering whether by my silence I had just agreed with “everyone” that he had the biggest inauguration crowd in history, had given a great inauguration speech, had never mistreated women, and so on. The barrage of words was almost designed to prevent a genuine two-way dialogue from ever happening.

  Then there were the baffling, unnecessary lies. At one point, for example, the president told me that Chief of Staff Reince Priebus didn’t know we were meeting, which seemed incredible. A chief of staff should know when the president is dining alone with the FBI director. Then, later on in that same dinner, Trump said casually, “Reince knows we’re meeting.”

  Unprompted, and in another zag in the conversation, he brought up what he called the “golden showers thing,” repeating much of what he had said to me previously, adding that it bothered him if there was “even a one percent chance” his wife, Melania, thought it was true. That distracted me slightly because I immediately began wondering why his wife would think there was any chance, even a small one, that he had been with prostitutes urinating on each other in Moscow. For all my flaws, there is a zero percent chance—literally absolute zero—that Patrice would credit an allegation that I was with hookers peeing on each other in Moscow. She would laugh at the very suggestion. In what kind of marriage, to what kind of man, does a spouse conclude there is only a 99 percent chance her husband didn’t do that?

  I’m almost certain the president is unfamiliar with the proverb “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” because he just rolled on, unprompted, explaining why it couldn’t possibly be true, ending by saying he was thinking of asking me to investigate the allegation to prove it was a lie. I said it was up to him. At the same time, I expressed the concern that such a thing would create a narrative that we were investigating him personally and added that it is also very difficult to prove something never happened. He said I might be right, but repeatedly asked me to think about it, and said he would as well.

  One of his few questions, again seemingly out of nowhere, was to ask me how I compared Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. I explained that Holder was much closer to President Obama, which had its advantages and its perils. I used the opportunity as an excuse to again explain why it was so important that the FBI and the Department of Justice be independent of the White House. I said it was a paradox: Throughout history, some presidents have decided that because “problems” come from Justice, they should try to hold the department close. But blurring those boundaries ultimately makes the problems worse by undermining public trust in the institutions and their work. I got no sense he had any idea about—or interest in—what I was saying.

  Something else occurred to me about President Trump at that dinner that I found very instructive. I don’t recall seeing him laugh, ever. Not during small talk before meetings. Not in a conversation. Not even here, during an ostensibly relaxed dinner. Months later, the thought of a man whom I had never seen laugh stayed with me. I wondered if maybe others had noticed it or if in thousands of hours of video coverage, he had ever laughed. He had spent literally decades in front of video cameras, between his highly choreographed career as a business mogul and his years as a reality television star. So, out of curiosity, I googled it and looked through YouTube videos. In all of my searching, I found one video of something that could be called Donald Trump exhibiting a laugh, and a mean one at that—in January 2016, when he asked a New Hampshire audience about the origin of a noise in the background that sounded like a dog barking and someone shouted: “It’s Hillary.” There is a risk that I’m overinterpreting this, and I suppose it’s possible that in private he may keep his wife or children or some favorite staff member in stitches or that I have missed a collection of his public laughs, but I don’t know of another elected leader who doesn’t laugh with some regularity in public. I suspect his apparent inability to do so is rooted in deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president.

  Near the end of our dinner, he asked another question—the first that was actually an effort to learn something about his guest. He wondered how I ended up as FBI director. In answering, I told him I had been pleasantly surprised that President Obama thought of the job as I did: he wanted competence and independence, and didn’t want the FBI involved in policy but wanted to sleep at night knowing the FBI was well run. I recounted our first discussion in the Oval Office together, which, even in that moment, occurred to me as the polar opposite of what was unfolding at this dinner. President Trump replied by saying he was happy I wanted to stay because he had heard such great things about me from so many people, including his picks for secretary of defense and attorney general.

  He then returned to the issue of loyalty, saying again, “I need loyalty.”

  I paused, again. “You will always get honesty from me,” I said.

  He paused. “That’s what I want, honest loyalty,” he said. This appeared to satisfy him as some of sort of “deal” in which we were both winners.

  I paused. “You will get that from me,” I said, desperate to end our awkward standoff and telling myself that I had done enough to make clear where I stood.

  In that moment, something else occurred to me: The “leader of the free world,” the self-described great business tycoon, didn’t understand leadership. Ethical leaders never ask for loyalty. Those leading through fear—like a Cosa Nostra boss—require personal loyalty. Ethical leaders care deepl
y about those they lead, and offer them honesty and decency, commitment and their own sacrifice. They have a confidence that breeds humility. Ethical leaders know their own talent but fear their own limitations—to understand and reason, to see the world as it is and not as they wish it to be. They speak the truth and know that making wise decisions requires people to tell them the truth. And to get that truth, they create an environment of high standards and deep consideration—“love” is not too strong a word—that builds lasting bonds and makes extraordinary achievement possible. It would never occur to an ethical leader to ask for loyalty.

  After dessert—two scoops of ice cream, for each of us—I went home and wrote a memo about the dinner, which quickly became my practice with President Trump after occasions when we spoke alone. I had never done something like that before in my conversations with other presidents, and didn’t write memos as FBI director about encounters with any other person, but a number of factors made it seem prudent to do so with this president. For one, we were touching on topics that involved the FBI’s responsibilities and the president personally, and I was discussing those things with a person whose integrity I had come to seriously doubt after watching him campaign for president and since. I needed to protect the FBI and myself because I couldn’t trust this person to tell the truth about our conversations. As was my practice, I printed two copies of the memo. One I shared with the FBI senior leadership team and then had my chief of staff keep in his files. The other I locked up at home, for two reasons: I considered the memo my personal property, like a diary; and I was concerned that having accurate recollections of conversations with this president might be important someday, which, sadly, turned out to be true.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE CLOUD

  If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable.

  —THOMAS MORE

  ON FEBRUARY 8, 2017, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus invited me to the White House to meet with him in his office, a large room with a conference table and fireplace that offered a view of the grand Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This was the same room I had been in thirteen years earlier with Vice President Dick Cheney to hear his view that thousands would die if the Justice Department didn’t bend its view of lawful electronic surveillance. It was the same room I sat in near midnight later that same week in 2004, after the standoff at John Ashcroft’s hospital bed.

  I was there now as a follow-up to my dinner with President Trump and because Priebus wanted to understand, and I wanted to explain, the proper relationship between the FBI and the White House. Priebus had never worked in a presidential administration and seemed genuinely interested in getting it right.

  By that point, I’d interacted with two other White House chiefs of staff. My most memorable and contentious interaction was the race to the hospital against Andy Card during the Bush administration. As FBI director under President Obama, I had come to know his chief of staff best. Denis McDonough was an extraordinarily decent, thoughtful, and yet tough person. All chiefs of staff differ, as all people do, in their personalities and leadership qualities. But they all share the experience of prolonged sleep deprivation, as they try to manage the effective operation of the White House and bring some order to what could be, at the best of times, a chaotic enterprise. No president in our history, of course, came close to Donald Trump, who brought his own skills and challenges, and a unique brand of chaos.

  I did not know Priebus well. He often seemed both confused and irritated, and it was not hard to imagine why. Running the Trump White House would be a difficult job for even an experienced manager, which Priebus wasn’t. Previously chairman of the Republican National Committee and before that a Wisconsin lawyer, Priebus had never served in the federal government. How could someone like that—or anyone, for that matter—manage someone like Donald Trump? I have no idea. But Priebus seemed to be trying.

  Our meeting lasted about twenty minutes, was pleasant, and covered a variety of classified topics, as well as how the FBI and the Department of Justice should interact with the White House. As we were winding up, he asked me if I wanted to see the president. Ironically, the request perfectly undercut the entire point of our meeting. I had just finished discussing the importance of the White House working in a disciplined fashion through the Department of Justice if it wished to communicate with the FBI, except about national security emergencies and National Security Council policy discussions—like encryption—in which the FBI was a key participant. The theme of the conversation was that the FBI must be at arm’s length. Priebus said he understood, and then he immediately wanted to bring me even closer.

  After my last encounters, another visit with the president was not high on my priority list. So I said no—thanks, but no thanks—adding that I was sure the president was too busy. He asked again. I demurred again.

  He then said, “Sit. I’m sure he’d love to see you. Let me see if he’s in the Oval.” He walked down the hall, the short distance to the Oval Office, and returned moments later. With a smile, he said, “He’d love to see you.”

  Without a smile, I replied, “Great.”

  When the two of us walked into the Oval Office, the president was talking with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who left shortly after we arrived, leaving Priebus and me with the president alone.

  Though this was not the first time I’d seen the new president, it was the first time I had seen him in his new office. He didn’t look comfortable. He was sitting, suit jacket on, close against the famous Resolute desk, both forearms on the desk. As a result, he was separated from everyone who spoke to him by a large block of wood.

  In dozens of meetings in that space with Presidents Bush and Obama, I cannot recall ever seeing them stationed at their desk. They instead sat in an armchair by the fireplace and held meetings in a more open, casual arrangement. That made sense to me. As hard as it is to get people to relax and open up with a president, the chances are much better in the sitting area, where we can pretend we are friends gathered around a coffee table. There, the president can try to be one of a group, and draw the others out to tell him the truth. But when the president sits on a throne, protected by a large wooden obstacle, as Trump routinely did in my interactions with him, the formality of the Oval Office is magnified and the chances of getting the full truth plummet.

  I also noticed President Trump had changed the curtains, which were now a bright gold. I later learned they were Bill Clinton’s curtains, which, considering Trump’s public views of the former president and his candidate wife, seemed an odd twist. (The press reported that President Trump later replaced the Clinton curtains with his own version of gold.)

  As the president greeted me, I sat down in a small wood chair, my knees touching his desk. Priebus tried to steer the conversation to the subject of the so-called Russian dossier that we’d already discussed numerous times. I’m not sure why he did that, but for once the president wasn’t interested in discussing that particular topic. Instead, sitting at the desk once used by Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, he launched into one of his rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness monologues. This time the focus was on a television interview he had given to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News several days earlier. The interview had run during the Super Bowl pregame show, which I had skipped. But I saw plenty of commentary about it afterward.

  During the interview, O’Reilly had pressed President Trump as to whether he “respected” Russian president Vladimir Putin:

  “I do respect him,” Trump said, “but I respect a lot of people. That doesn’t mean I’m going to get along with him.”

  “But he’s a killer,” O’Reilly said. “Putin’s a killer.”

  “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

  Trump’s answer, seeming to equate Putin’s thuggish regime with American democracy, led to a flurry of criticism from all sides. It also played into a narrative that Trump was too close to the R
ussian government, an odd line for Trump to encourage. I had often wondered why, when given numerous opportunities to condemn the Russian government’s invasions of its neighbors and repression—even murder—of its own citizens, Trump refused to just state the plain facts. Maybe it was a contrarian streak or maybe it was something more complicated that explained his constant equivocation and apologies for Vladimir Putin. Still, it struck me as odd. Perhaps there was some sound geopolitical rationale for not publicly condemning bad behavior of a foreign government in its own internal matters. But, four weeks earlier at Trump Tower, the president had seemed untroubled when the leaders of the intelligence community unanimously briefed him that Russia had intervened to damage our democracy and had tried to tip the scales of our election. Even behind closed doors, he didn’t recoil about Russian behavior. He didn’t wonder what our adversary might do next. We knew that Vladimir Putin had interfered with the U.S. election in an unprecedented fashion, at least in part to help Trump win. Comments like the one to O’Reilly only underscored why Putin wanted him in office.