by James Comey
The president went on to say that if there were some “satellite” associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out. He repeated that he hadn’t done anything wrong and he hoped I would find a way to get it out that we weren’t investigating him.
In an abrupt shift, he turned the conversation to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. He said he hadn’t brought up “the McCabe thing” because I had said McCabe was honorable, although Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, was close to the Clintons and had given him (I think he meant McCabe’s wife) campaign money. I knew what he was referring to. McCabe’s wife, Jill, a physician in northern Virginia, had run for the Virginia state legislature and lost in 2015, when McCabe was in charge of the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office. She had been recruited to run by Governor McAuliffe, and her campaign was funded in large part by money from political action committees the governor controlled. Trump had repeatedly accused the FBI during the presidential campaign of going soft on Hillary Clinton because Andy’s wife was connected to the Virginia governor, an old friend of the Clintons. As a presidential candidate, Trump also had claimed, incorrectly, that Hillary Clinton herself had given money to McCabe’s wife.
In any event, the assertion was nonsense, for a bunch of reasons—including that the FBI was not exactly a secret cabal of Clinton lovers. Although special agents are trained to check their politics at the door, they tend to lean to the right side of the political spectrum—and McCabe had long considered himself a Republican. And the FBI spent years investigating various Clinton-related cases, including during the Bill Clinton presidency, when FBI Director Louis Freeh, a former special agent, famously surrendered his White House pass because he considered Clinton a criminal investigative subject. But Trump had twice asked me early in his tenure whether “McCabe has a problem with me, because I was pretty tough on his wife.” I had answered that Andy was a true professional and put all that stuff to the side.
I didn’t understand why the president was bringing this up on the phone now—it might well have been his attempt at trading favors, or a threat that he would start attacking the deputy director. I repeated that McCabe was an honorable person, not motivated by politics.
President Trump finished by stressing “the cloud” that was interfering with his ability to make deals for the country and said he hoped I could find a way to get out that he wasn’t being investigated. I told him I would see what we could do, and that we would do our investigative work well and as quickly as we could.
Immediately after that conversation, I called Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente (because Sessions had recused himself on Russia-related matters and there was no confirmed deputy attorney general) to report the president’s request to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation, and said I would await his guidance. I did not hear back from him before Trump called me again two weeks later.
* * *
On the morning of April 11, the president called to ask what I had done about his request that I “get out” that he is not personally under investigation. In contrast to most of our other interactions, there were no compliments thrown, no cheery check-ins just to see what I was up to. He seemed irritated with me.
I replied that I had passed his request to the acting deputy attorney general, but I had not heard back. He replied that “the cloud” was getting in the way of his ability to do his job. He said that perhaps he would have his people reach out to the acting deputy attorney general. I said that was the way his request should be handled. The White House counsel should contact the leadership of DOJ to make the request, which was the traditional channel.
He said he would do that. Then he added, “Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal. We had that thing, you know.”
I did not reply or ask him what he meant by “that thing,” but it seemed an attempt to invoke a mutual pledge of loyalty, one he struggled to deliver as he recalled I had actually resisted pledging loyalty. At “the thing” we had, a private dinner in the Green Room, he was promised only “honest loyalty.” Regardless, I responded to his odd effort to invoke loyalty by saying only that the way to handle it was to have the White House counsel call the acting deputy attorney general. He said that was what he would do, and the call ended.
That was the last time I spoke with President Trump. We reported the call to the acting deputy attorney general. He had apparently done nothing since March 30, replying, “Oh, God, I was hoping that would just go away.”
It wouldn’t go away.
* * *
Fittingly, it all finally ended in a blizzard of awful behavior. I was in Los Angeles on May 9, 2017, to attend a Diversity Agent Recruiting event. This was an effort we had previously mounted in Washington and Houston, where we invited talented young lawyers, engineers, and business school graduates of color to come listen to why they should take cuts in pay and become FBI special agents. I loved these events—which were in keeping with our quest to attract more minority agents—and the two so far had been hugely successful. Diversifying the Bureau was the key to our sustained effectiveness. As noted earlier, the major obstacle was that so many young people, especially high-potential black and Latino men and women, thought of the FBI as “The Man.” Who would want to work for “The Man”? I loved these events because it gave me and other FBI leaders the chance to show these talented people a bit more about what “The Man,” and the woman, of the FBI were really like.
These young people were hungry to make a difference, and we could show them what lives of service, sacrifice, and making an extraordinary difference for good looked like. Almost nobody leaves the FBI once they taste the life of a special agent. My mission was to dare these great young people to try to join that life. The yield from events in Washington and Houston had been surprisingly high. I was coming to L.A. to speak to more than five hundred potential new agents. I knew that audience held many future special agents. I couldn’t wait to connect with them.
Although the recruiting event was in the evening, I went early enough to have time to visit the FBI’s Los Angeles field office. I was committed to walking around FBI offices everywhere, floor by floor and cubicle by cubicle, meeting every employee and shaking every hand. It was worth the effort because I could tell it meant a lot to our people to have the director thank them personally. In a big organization like the FBI, with offices around the country and the world, it helps to remind people that you appreciate the hard work they do. That you care about them, not just professionally, but about them—and their families. Every time I traveled, I carved out hours to visit the field offices to meet the amazing people that staffed them.
I met dozens of L.A. employees standing at their desks. The L.A. office leadership had also done something thoughtful and assembled those who didn’t have desks—the cleaning staff and those working in the communications room. They were all sitting at tables in a large command center room. I began addressing them at about 2 P.M. Los Angeles time, 5 P.M. in Washington. I explained that we had rewritten the FBI’s mission statement in 2015 to make it shorter and to better express the importance of our responsibility. Our newly defined mission was to “protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” I said I wanted it shorter so everyone would know it, connect to it, and share it with neighbors and especially young people. I expected everyone to realize …
And then I stopped in midsentence.
On the TV screens along the back wall I could see COMEY RESIGNS in large letters. The screens were behind my audience, but they noticed my distraction and started turning in their seats. I laughed and said, “That’s pretty funny. Somebody put a lot of work into that one.” I continued my thought. “There are no support employees in the FBI. I expect…”
The message on the screens now changed. Across three screens, displaying three different news stations, I now saw the same words: COMEY FIRED. I wasn’t laughing any longer. There was a buzz in the room. I told the audience, “Look, I�
��m going to go figure out what’s happening, but whether that’s true or not, my message won’t change, so let me finish it and then shake your hands.” I said, “Every one of you is personally responsible for protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution of the United States. We all have different roles, but the same mission. Thank you for doing it well.” I then moved among the employees, shaking every hand, and walked to a private office to find out what was happening.
The FBI director travels with a communications team so he can be reached by the Justice Department or White House in seconds, any time of day or night. But nobody called. Not the attorney general. Not the deputy attorney general. Nobody. I actually had seen the attorney general the day before. Days earlier, I had met alone with the newly confirmed deputy attorney general at his request so he could ask my advice on how to do his job—which I held from 2003 to 2005. In late October, shortly before the election, the now-DAG had been serving as the United States Attorney in Baltimore, and he invited me to speak to his entire staff about leadership and why I made the decisions I did in July about the Clinton email case. He praised me then as an inspirational leader. Now, he not only didn’t call me, he had authored a memo to justify my firing, describing my conduct during 2016 as awful and unacceptable. That made absolutely no sense to me in light of our recent contacts.
All I knew was what was being reported in the media. After much scrambling, we learned that a White House employee was down on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, trying to deliver a letter to me from the president. I took a call from my wife, who said she and the kids had seen the news. I replied that I didn’t know whether it was true and we were trying to find out what was going on. Pat Fitzgerald called and I told him the same thing.
I took an emotional call from General John Kelly, then the secretary of Homeland Security. He said he was sick about my firing and that he intended to quit in protest. He said he didn’t want to work for dishonorable people who would treat someone like me in such a manner. I urged Kelly not to do that, arguing that the country needed principled people around this president. Especially this president.
My amazing assistant, Althea James, got the letter from the White House guy at the front door down on Pennsylvania Avenue. She scanned it and emailed it to me. I was fired, effective immediately, by the president who had repeatedly praised me and asked me to stay, based on a recommendation from the deputy attorney general, who had praised me as a great leader, a recommendation accepted by the attorney general, who was both recused from all Russia-related matters and who, according to President Trump at our dinner, thought I was great. The reasons for that firing were lies, but the letter was real. I felt sick to my stomach and slightly dazed.
I stepped out of the office, and a large group of L.A. FBI employees had gathered. Many were tearful. I spoke to them briefly, telling them that the FBI’s values were bigger and stronger than any one of us. It broke my heart to leave them, I said, but they should know it was their quality as people—honest, competent, and independent—that made this so painful. I hated to leave them. I went to the office of the Los Angeles FBI leader, Deirdre Fike. I had chosen her for that job and trusted her judgment. My first instinct, and hers, was that I should attend the diversity event anyway, as a private citizen. This was something I cared deeply about, and I could still urge these talented men and women to join this life, even if I would no longer be part of it. Eventually, though, we decided I would be a distraction because a media circus would crash the event. I could do more harm than good. I decided to go home.
Which raised the question: How would I get home? I left that decision to the man who minutes earlier had become the acting director of the FBI, my deputy, Andrew McCabe. The news had been just as big a surprise to him as it had been to me. Now he was in command. He and his team had to figure out what was lawful and appropriate. In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport.
News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel.
As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news.
President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California.
McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely.
The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close.
Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since.
Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did,” Andy replied.
The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.
* * *
I sat by myself on the flight home, trying to gather my thoughts and committing what would have been a rules violation if I were still an FBI employee. I reached into my suitcase and retrieved a bottle of pinot noir I was bringing home from California. I drank red wine from a paper coffee cup and stared out the window at the lights of the country I love so much. As we approached Washington, I asked the pilots if I could sit up front with them to experience the landing at Reagan Airport in a way I never had, despite hundreds of flights on FBI planes. I sat in the jump seat just behind them, headphones on, and watched two talented special agent–pilots land the plane, for the last time with me as a passenger. They had taken me all over the country and the world and now squeezed my hand an extra beat as we said good-bye, with tears in our eyes.
As I flew home from California that night, sipping red wine, I was left with my thoughts about what might come next. I wasn’t planning to do anything except take some time to figure out what to do with my life. In the days that followed, on their own initiative, friends shared with the media things I had told them about my struggle to establish appropriate boundaries between the FBI and the Trump White House and my effort to resist pledging loyalty to President Trump at our dinner, but there were dark stories about my experience with the president that were not yet in the media.
It may sound strange, but throughout my five months working under Donald Trump, I wanted him to succeed as president. That’s not a political bias. Had Hil
lary Clinton been elected, I would have wanted her to succeed as president. I think that’s what it means to love your country. We need our presidents to succeed. My encounters with President Trump left me sad, not angry. I don’t know him or his life well, but he seems not to have benefited from watching people like Harry Howell demonstrate what tough and kind leadership looks like, or worked under someone who was confident enough to be humble, like Helen Fahey, and felt the difference that makes. Although I am sure he has seen human suffering and encountered personal loss, I never saw any evidence that it shaped him the way it did Patrice and me in losing our son Collin, or the millions of others who suffer loss and then channel their pain into empathy and care for others. I learned searing lessons from being a bully and from lying about my own basketball career and seeing how “easy lies” can become a habit. I see no evidence that a lie ever caused Trump pain, or that he ever recoiled from causing another person pain, which is sad and frightening. Without all those things—without kindness to leaven toughness, without a balance of confidence and humility, without empathy, and without respect for truth—there is little chance President Trump can attract and keep the kind of people around him that every president needs to make wise decisions. That makes me sad for him, but it makes me worry for our country.
On Friday, May 12, President Trump tweeted a warning to me and his thirty-nine million followers: “James Comey better hope there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.” This struck me as bizarre. Was he threatening me? I had no plans to talk to the press or leak classified information. All I wanted was to get Donald Trump out of my head, so I didn’t spend time thinking about what it meant. Instead, I stayed inside my house, sleeping, exercising, and avoiding the media crowd gathered at the end of my driveway.
