A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

  In his own blustery way, O’Reilly had challenged the president on his apparent affinity for Putin. And again, Trump had doubled down on his unwillingness to criticize the Russian government.

  Now, three days later, seemingly stung or at least preoccupied by the criticism, the president was still fuming and justifying himself.

  “What am I going to do?” Trump asked no one in particular. “Say I don’t respect the leader of a major country I’m trying to get along with?”

  At first, neither Priebus nor I said anything. We couldn’t even if we’d wanted to, because, as was his practice, President Trump left no space for others to talk. O’Reilly had posed a hard question, he told us. “So I gave a good answer,” he said, looking at us, all but insisting that there was no other rational way to see it. “Really, it was a great answer. I gave a really great answer.”

  As Trump kept talking, I could see he was convincing himself of this story line and clearly thought he was convincing us, too. Of course, I didn’t think O’Reilly’s question was hard, or Trump’s answer good, but this wasn’t about him seeking feedback.

  In fact, by this point, I had dealt with the president enough to have something of a read on what Trump was doing. His assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our dinner, because he never stops talking. As a result, Trump pulls all those present into a silent circle of assent. With him talking a mile a minute, with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, I could see how easily everyone in the room could become a coconspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. But as Martin Luther once said, “You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.”

  As I sat there, I watched the president building with his words a cocoon of alternative reality that he was busily wrapping around all of us. I must have agreed that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history, as he asserted in our previous meetings, because I didn’t challenge that. I must therefore agree that his interview with O’Reilly was great, his answers brilliant, because I sat there and didn’t object. But I’d be damned if I was going to let this trick work on me again. And this time he gave me the opening. Looking at me, he said, “You think it was a great answer, right?” and started to move on.

  I jumped on it and did something I might never have done as a younger person—especially to a president of the United States. Something I’d never seen anyone else do around Trump in the limited number of interactions I’d had with him. I can’t remember if it was midsentence or in a brief pause before he launched into the next set of assertions to which we were all supposed to agree, but I interrupted his monologue.

  “The first part of your answer was fine, Mr. President,” I said, as he took a breath and looked at me with a blank expression. “But not the second part. We aren’t the kind of killers that Putin is.”

  At that remark, Trump stopped talking altogether. In that brightly lit room, with its shiny gold curtains, a shadow seemed to cross his face. I could see something change in his eyes. A hardness, or darkness. In a blink, the eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. He looked like someone who wasn’t used to being challenged or corrected by those around him. He was the one who was supposed to be in complete control. With a small comment, I had just poured a cold dose of criticism and reality on his shameful moral equivalence between Putin’s thugs and the men and women of our government. And just as quickly as the glower crossed his face, it was gone. It was as if I had not spoken, and had never been born. The meeting was done.

  The president thanked me for coming in. Priebus, who had said nothing throughout this exchange, escorted me from the room, and I walked off without further conversation.

  I went back to the FBI headquarters and told members of my staff that I had probably ended any personal relationship with the president with that move. I had resisted his request for a pledge of loyalty two weeks earlier, and now I had just cut through the cocoon to criticize the man behind the desk. We weren’t going to have a friendly rapport, as I did with Presidents Bush and Obama. That was not necessarily a bad thing. FBI directors shouldn’t be too close to a sitting president or his administration—which, of course, was the original reason I was at the White House that day.

  Still, the encounter left me shaken. I had never seen anything like it in the Oval Office. As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.

  * * *

  Less than a week later, I was back at the scene, my knees again touching the Resolute desk.

  On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of President Trump. He again held forth from behind the desk, and a group of us sat in a semicircle of about six chairs facing him on the other side. I was seated in that semicircle with Vice President Pence, the deputy director of the CIA, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the secretary of Homeland Security, and my new boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The new attorney general had been in office less than a week at that point. My first impressions of him were that he was eerily similar to Alberto Gonzales—both overwhelmed and overmatched by the job—but Sessions lacked the kindness Gonzales radiated.

  The president seemed oddly uninterested and distracted during the classified briefing. I had some concerning and important things to say about the current terrorism threat inside the United States, but they drew no reaction. At the end of the low-energy session, he signaled that the briefing was over. “Thanks, everybody,” he said in a loud voice. Then, pointing at me, he added, “I just want to talk to Jim. Thanks, everybody.”

  Here we go again.

  I didn’t know what he wanted to talk about, but this request was so unusual that I suspected another memo lay in my immediate future. As such, I knew I needed to try to remember every word he spoke, exactly as he said them.

  Having no choice in the matter, I stayed in my chair, as the participants started to leave the Oval Office. The attorney general, however, lingered by my chair. As my boss at the Justice Department, he undoubtedly and rightly thought he should be present for this conversation. “Thanks, Jeff,” the president said in a dismissive manner, “but I want to talk to Jim.”

  Then it was Jared Kushner’s turn. Kushner had been sitting behind me, with other White House aides, on the couches and chairs by the coffee table. He likely knew his father-in-law better than anyone else in the room and seemed to be attempting a similar sort of intervention. By engaging me in a conversation while the others were clearing out—Jared talked about the Clinton email investigation and how hard it must have been—perhaps he thought Trump would forget that he’d asked everyone out, including him. No dice.

  “Okay, Jared, thank you,” Trump said. His son-in-law seemed as reluctant as Sessions, but he too made his exit.

  When the door by the grandfather clock closed and we were alone, the president set his eyes on me.

  “I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” he said. Flynn, his national security adviser, had been forced to resign the previous day. I didn’t know Flynn well, but had testified alongside him in 2014 when he served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I found him likable.

  Flynn, who was a retired U.S. Army general, had spoken to the Russian ambassador to the United States multiple times during December 2016, to seek the Russians’ help in derailing a United Nations resolution—which the Obama administration was not going to veto—condemning Israel for the expansion of its settlements in occupied territory, and also to urge the Russians not to escalate their response to Obama administration sanctions imposed as a result of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The conversations about sanctions had become the subje
ct of intense public interest after they were reported in the media in early January and Vice President–Elect Pence went on television to deny Flynn had talked about sanctions with the Russians. Pence said he knew this because he had talked to Flynn. On January 24, as part of our continuing investigation of Russian influence efforts, I dispatched two agents to the White House to interview Flynn about his conversations with the Russians. He lied to the agents, denying that he had discussed the very topics he had talked about in detail with the Russian ambassador.

  The president began by saying General Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the vice president. He added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify.

  The president then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information—a concern I shared. Like all presidents before him, he was frustrated that people with access to classified information were out there talking to reporters about it. I explained that this was a long-standing problem that had plagued his predecessors and that the cases were hard to make because they required us to sometimes have investigative contact with members of the media (for example, by subpoenaing phone records). But I also told him that if we could make a case—if we could nail a leaker of classified information to the wall—it would serve as an important deterrence signal. Although I had made no reference or suggestion about going after members of the media, the president said something about how we once put reporters in jail and that made them talk. This was a reference to the Scooter Libby investigation, when New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent nearly three months in jail in 2005 for contempt of court in refusing to comply with a court order for information about her conversations with Libby. He then urged me to talk to Attorney General Sessions about ways to be more aggressive in making cases against leakers of classified information. I told him I would convey that message.

  After the president had spoken for a few minutes about leaks, Reince Priebus leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock. I could see a group of people, including the vice president, waiting behind him. The president waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed.

  The president then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that General Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the vice president.

  He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

  At the time, I had understood the president to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the president to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency. Imagine the reaction if a President Hillary Clinton had asked to speak to the FBI director alone and urged him to back off the investigation of her national security advisor.

  I did not interrupt the president to protest that what he was asking was inappropriate, as I probably should have. But if he didn’t know what he was doing was inappropriate, why had he just ejected everyone, including my boss and the vice president, from the room so he could speak with me alone?

  Instead, I only agreed that “he is a good guy,” or seemed to be from what I knew of him. I did not say I would “let this go.”

  The president showed no reaction to my reply and returned briefly to the problem of leaks. The conversation ended and I got up and left through the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Priebus, the vice president, and the new secretary of health and human services, Tom Price. No one spoke to me.

  In the car, I emailed my staff that the counterterrorism briefing they had spent so much time preparing me for had gone well, but “now I have to write another memo.” What I meant was that I had another conversation with the president that I needed to document. I prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership, including Deputy Director McCabe; my chief of staff, Jim Rybicki; and the FBI’s general counsel, Jim Baker. In a little over a month, I had now written multiple memos about encounters with Donald Trump. I knew I would need to remember these conversations both because of their content and because I knew I was dealing with a chief executive who might well lie about them. To protect the FBI, and myself, I needed a contemporaneous record.

  The other FBI leaders agreed that it was important not to infect the investigative team looking at Flynn—and more broadly at alleged Russian coordination with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election—with the president’s request, which we did not intend to follow. We also concluded that, given that it was a one-on-one conversation, there was no way to corroborate my account. We decided it made little sense to report it to Attorney General Sessions, who we expected would likely recuse himself from involvement in Russia-related investigations. (He did so two weeks later.) The deputy attorney general’s role was then filled in an acting capacity by a United States Attorney who would not be staying in the job. We resolved to figure out down the road what to do with the president’s request and its implications as our investigation progressed.

  After the February 14 meeting with the president, I directed Jim Rybicki to arrange for me to speak to the attorney general at the completion of our regular Wednesday threat briefing the next morning. At the close of the regular meeting, everyone left the room, except the attorney general, me, and our chiefs of staff. Sessions was sitting across the table from me in the secure conference room at the Department of Justice. He was in the same place, and likely the same chair, where Loretta Lynch had been sitting when she told me to call the Clinton email investigation “a matter.”

  When the room was clear, I did what I had promised the president and passed along his concerns about leaks and his expectation that we would be aggressive in pursuing them. Under the optimistic assumption that the attorney general had any control over President Trump, I then took the opportunity to implore him to prevent any future one-on-one communications between the president and me. “That can’t happen,” I said. “You are my boss. You can’t be kicked out of the room so he can talk to me alone. You have to be between me and the president.” He didn’t ask me whether anything happened that troubled me, and I didn’t say, for reasons discussed above. Instead, in a move that would become familiar to me, Sessions cast his eyes down at the table, and they darted quickly back and forth, side to side. To my memory, he said nothing. After a brief moment of eye darting, he put both hands on the table and stood, thanking me for coming. I read in his posture and face a message that he would not be able to help me. Rybicki and I left. I was so thrown by the silent eye darting that I had Rybicki follow up with a call to Sessions’s chief of staff to make sure he understood my concern and the importance of the attorney general’s shielding me from the president. His chief of staff said they got it.

  But they didn’t. Or couldn’t.

  * * *

  I would struggle with President Trump for three more months. On March 1, I was about to get on a helicopter to fly to an opioid summit in Richmond when my assistant, Althea James, called me on my cell phone to say the president wanted to speak with me. I had no idea what the subject was, but assumed it must be important, so I waited in the FBI Suburban on the helipad. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s leader, my old friend Chuck Rosenberg, waited for me on the helicopter.

  After several minutes, my cell phone rang and a White House operator announced the president. He came on the line to say he was calling “just to see how you’re doing.” I replied that I was doing fine and had a lot going on. To make conversation, I told him the attorney general seemed to have hit the ground running wi
th a good speech about violent crime. He replied, “That’s his thing.” The awkward conversation, which lasted less than a minute, struck me as yet another effort to bring me close, to ensure I was an amica nostra, a friend of ours. Why else would the president of the United States, who presumably had a million things to do, call the FBI director just to “see how you’re doing”? I got out of the car and joined the DEA leader, apologizing that the delay was because the president just wanted to say “wassup.”

  On March 30, Trump called me at the FBI to describe the Russia investigation as “a cloud” that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. For about the fourth time, he argued that the “golden showers thing” wasn’t true, asking yet again, “Can you imagine me, hookers?” In an apparent play for my sympathy, he added that he has a beautiful wife and the whole thing has been very painful to her.

  He asked what we could do to “lift the cloud.” I responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could, and that there would be great benefit, if we didn’t find anything, to our having done the work well. He agreed, but then reemphasized the problems this was causing him.

  Then the president asked why there had been a congressional hearing about Russia the previous week—at which I had, as the Department of Justice directed, confirmed the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. I explained the demands from the leadership of both parties in Congress for more information, and that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Iowa senator Charles Grassley, had even held up the confirmation of the deputy attorney general until we briefed him in detail on the investigation. I also explained that we had briefed the leadership of Congress on exactly which individuals we were investigating and that we had told those congressional leaders that we were not personally investigating President Trump. He repeatedly told me, “We need to get that fact out.” I did not tell the president, mostly because I knew he wouldn’t want to hear it, that the FBI and the Department of Justice had been reluctant to make public statements that we did not have an open case on President Trump for a number of reasons, most important that it would create a duty to correct that statement should that status change.