Jim explained to his wife that he had essentially two options. He could sit back and allow the Department of Justice to take the lead in making the announcement. Or he could take it upon himself to hold a press conference announcing what the investigation found, and essentially clearing the Democratic nominee.
Patrice would give it to him straight. And her response would not make the decision easier.
But then, she had a history of saving him.
Jim and Patrice met in 1980, their junior year at the College of William & Mary. A mutual friend introduced them at a dorm party.
“We sat together on a couch,” Jim once remembered. “She let me talk about myself for three hours. Naturally, I walked away deeply in love with her, because she let me talk about myself, a habit which she has since fixed.”
After graduation, Jim went to law school at the University of Chicago, and Patrice moved to Sierra Leone for two years to serve in the Peace Corps. She was stationed in a small village in the southern part of the country near the Liberian border. From there, she traveled to remote villages on a 125 cc Yamaha dirt bike to tutor teachers who were taking entrance exams for college and to educate local women about children’s health and nutrition.
In the summer of 1983, Jim visited her there. As a treat one night, Patrice arranged for them to stay in a guesthouse atop a remote mountain in the Kambui Hills Forest Reserve.
“We were sitting there watching the sunset, and I turned to her and said, ‘What are the symptoms of malaria?’ ” Jim later recalled.
“I’m not going to tell you, because then you’ll get it,” Patrice said, assuming he was just imagining things.
Jim said he felt a pain radiating up his spine and that he was getting chills. It was late in the afternoon, it would be dark soon, and help was hours away.
“We gotta get out of here,” she said.
Patrice would get them off the mountain on her motorcycle. With Jim fevered and shaking, she told him to sit behind her and hold on no matter what.
“You can’t let go! You can’t!” she hollered as they headed down the switchback dirt roads to the bottom of the mountain.
By the time they arrived at the bottom, it was night out. She drove him to a nearby volunteer’s house, where she left him in a bed under a mosquito net. With few lights on the roads, Patrice took off by herself to search for medicine, only to be attacked on the dark road by a pack of wild dogs, crashing her motorcycle trying to avoid them. The dogs circled her, but she somehow managed to get away. Eventually, she found the antimalarial drugs and made it back to Jim, who was by then hallucinating.
The next day, she realized his condition was so serious that she needed to get him to a hospital. She rented a bush taxi, and they climbed in with two other passengers and a live chicken. The taxi got them to the hospital, where Patrice served as his nurse until he was out of danger.
Now, a world later, with the decision about what to do about Clinton’s emails hanging in the balance, Patrice thought he was in danger of a much different sort.
“I wish you wouldn’t do it,” Patrice told her husband.
“I have to,” he said.
“This is going to be bad for you,” she said.
“This could be very bad for me,” he answered. “But how would I make a decision on that basis? There is a whole institution to think of.”
The Comeys’ glass of wine that June evening had suddenly turned into a taut conversation. The fact that Jim was even talking about this told Patrice that it was a close call, even for him. Why else would he be asking her about it?
She was upset, and he was losing his patience. He paused and told her that if the bureau said nothing about what it had found, that would almost certainly arouse the anger and suspicion of the Republican Congress and that instead of a single painful event he would be hauled before committees on Capitol Hill from then until the election.
“There will be hearings all frickin’ summer that are not going to be fair to Hillary Clinton,” he told her. “We need to end it, we need to end it credibly, and we need to put it to bed. So rather than have it drip, drip, drip, I can control the story and get it out there in a way that’s best for everybody.”
Not best for everybody, Patrice thought. They both had their priorities. He said he was concerned about the FBI, and she said she was concerned about him. He understood her position but for once didn’t find it very helpful. He was reaching to her for something, but in a way he was already beyond her help.
“Why do you have to step out and get shot?” she pleaded. “Why you?”
Acknowledging the impasse, they both fell silent.
“You’re going to get slammed,” she finally said.
* * *
—
A few days later, on July 4 weekend, with several of their kids and their significant others coming into town for the holiday, the house seemed more like a hostel than a home. In the room Jim used as an office, his daughter’s boyfriend slept on a futon. A blanket was tacked to the frame around the glass doors to the office to keep the sun out. Two of their daughters—and one of their husbands—bunked on air mattresses in the basement. The other children were in bedrooms upstairs. Although Jim was preoccupied with his plans for the following week’s press conference, the family still made sure to continue an annual Comey family tradition.
Since the children were young, Jim would assign each family member a section of the Declaration of Independence to read aloud on the Fourth of July.
Patrice would typically read the first paragraph, Jim the last, and the rest would be divided up among the kids. “I thought when the kids started to move out and live on their own, it would fade away, but they were like, ‘What, Dad?’ ” Jim said.
As the kids added partners, they too were assigned sections. Those children who were elsewhere for the holiday would call or use FaceTime.
“What I do is give out these pieces,” Jim said. “The new sons-in-law get the crappy pieces.”
Through the barbecues and dinners that weekend, Jim closely monitored final tweaks his aides were making to his remarks. He wanted to maintain eye contact with the camera, and so he would memorize the speech. But the house was so crowded that there was no place for him to sit alone to work on it. So, over the weekend, as Americans celebrated the birth of the nation with hot dogs and fireworks, and Clinton headed back onto the campaign trail after being interviewed by FBI agents and federal prosecutors at the bureau’s headquarters, Jim took a beach chair and parked himself alone in the driveway. Sitting behind a gate the FBI had installed as a safety measure—in the ten- to fifteen-foot gap between his house and the neighbor’s—Jim recited the speech to himself over and over again, practicing for what he thought would be the most important public moment of his life.
How had he gotten to this point, to this feeling that the director of the FBI would personally and publicly need to explain the agency’s secret deliberations, in the most high-profile way imaginable? And where had this strange sense of personal destiny come from? From the vantage point of what was to come, Patrice’s sense of foreboding was well placed. But from childhood, Comey had been seized with the conviction that the world was a dangerous place and that only principled individuals can make a difference.
Comey grew up in Yonkers, New York, where his grandfather was the police chief. He was late to grow and got bullied a lot, which was a formative experience. Instead of playing sports, he sang in the choir and stocked shelves at the local grocery store. When he was sixteen, he started carrying around a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson in his wallet: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
A kid that earnest and that alone starts looking at the world differently, and
Jim developed a code about the proper way that people should be treated. He started questioning his Catholic upbringing and what he perceived as the hierarchical—and often hypocritical—structure of the religion. He would struggle in the years to come with questions about whether God existed. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that there is a divine force that plays a role in human history, answers prayers, and intervenes. And he couldn’t reconcile the concept of a loving God with reality, given the awfulness and tragedy of so much of human experience. It just wasn’t logical.
The parts of Christianity that he didn’t have any problem embracing were the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was a radical, and that excited Jim. Not God-made man, but a human, born to a husband and wife, and executed by the government for his radicalism. Jim didn’t believe the theology surrounding the biblical Jesus, but he found his call to live for other people to be profound. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me; love your neighbor as yourself—those ideas made sense. Jim found them to be wholesome, logical, and important.
So you might say that he approached spirituality like a lawyer. And just as the canon of laws provided a code for how best to treat each other, and influence human behavior, so too did the Bible. It was solid, he thought. You could organize a stable and principled society around those ideas. And without such a robust code for mankind, went Comey’s civic theology, we are lost.
I have a very dark view of humans, Jim would come to think. People are capable of so much that is awful and are dominated by biases and insecurities that drive to do awful things, especially in groups. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was central to his evolving idea of justice, because Niebuhr argued that to combat the evil in the world, good people needed to actively build and maintain a system to protect themselves from one another. The best you can hope for in human existence is to achieve something short of love, which is justice.
Jim thought the law, more than any other profession, had a direct hand in seeking justice, so he chose that path.
As a young lawyer in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan—the most prestigious office in the country—he prosecuted mobsters, fraudsters, terrorists, and gangsters from the mid-80s to the early 90s. He loved the work and the meritocratic nature of the office.
“The only relevant question was, ‘How good are you at your job?’ ” Jim recalled. “It was like picking sides for a pickup basketball game; you care only about picking the best squad.”
Jim noticed that the higher he rose in the Justice Department, the more he became disillusioned with political appointees above him who often looked at decisions through the lens of what it meant to their party. Whenever they were confronted with a difficult situation, too many political officials’ first instinct was to ask, “How does this look?” and “What can be said about this?” Only later would they ask, “What’s true?”
As deputy attorney general in the administration of George W. Bush, Comey saw flagrant examples of this impulse up close, which only darkened his view of politics. In the spring of 2004, he was forced to tilt against Vice President Dick Cheney, to prevent the White House from pushing the ailing and hospitalized attorney general, John Ashcroft, to sign off on a legally dubious surveillance program.
And just weeks later came the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, as photographs depicting dehumanizing abuse from the military prison in Iraq were published, sparking a reckoning across the government about the use and definition of torture and whether the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” methods were legal or moral. In spite of his silence, Patrice could tell that the revelations agonized Jim. She confronted him on the issue.
“Torture is wrong,” she told him one night that spring. “Don’t be the torture guy.”
“What?” Jim responded. “You know I can’t talk about that stuff.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Patrice said. “Just don’t be the torture guy.”
“Don’t be the torture guy” became a refrain in his head. Patrice’s warning had a profound effect on Jim and took on a larger significance than even the issue itself: It was a bracing reminder to Jim that people in power simply cannot be counted on to do the right thing, that people in power can seek to justify almost anything, and that power itself can hopelessly distort right from wrong.
In the aftermath of the scandal he stayed at the Justice Department, even though he would later come to question the decision.
“I convinced myself I was protecting the institution and that, without me, it would be worse off,” he says of that period. “Of course, that’s an easy thing to convince oneself of. I think a factor—maybe unconscious—was my desire to get out of there in a way that wouldn’t ruin my employment prospects.”
“Don’t be the torture guy” also brought home to Jim the extent to which Patrice served as a conscience. Unalloyed and unvarnished, Patrice’s appraisal was always there to put him straight. But in the end, Jim alone would step out before the lights.
He had tried to dedicate his life to getting at the truth of disputed matters. And with the Clinton investigation, he was confident that he could prevent a political firestorm by throwing facts at the problem.
“There was going to be a bad fire, and it would hurt the FBI,” he says. “That was inevitable. I never doubted it. When you are standing in the middle of hell, there is going to be fire damage.”
III
THE POINT OF NO RETURN
JULY 5, 2016
199 DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT
BONAPARTE AUDITORIUM, FBI HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.—Comey picked up the phone in his office that morning and called his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He told her he was going to hold a press conference. But he refused to say what it was about. She could have ordered him to tell her what he was up to, but she didn’t.
Around that time, the FBI alerted the media that the director planned to make a statement at headquarters later that morning, also declining to elaborate on what Comey might be saying. Reporters and photographers rushed over to a small auditorium on the bureau’s ground floor.
At home, Patrice had the television on as she anxiously waited.
Early that morning, as Jim was getting ready for the day, she had walked into his closet, examining his ties. “What tie…,” she said, deliberating what would look best on television.
They agreed on gold—not red or blue. Best to avoid the gang colors.
At 11:00 a.m., Jim walked out into the small auditorium and began his presentation.
“Get to the point, Jim,” Patrice said to herself. “Get to the point.”
But he didn’t get to the point. In anticipation of the criticism that he was in for, Comey’s speech first detailed all the ways in which Clinton had been reckless. Fact upon fact, his presentation was creating the unmistakable impression that the FBI director was building an argument for why the Democratic nominee should be charged with a crime.
“There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation,” Comey said about Clinton’s use of her personal email system.
Patrice’s friends who were also watching at home started sending her text messages.
Is he going to indict her? Oh my god?
“There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey said.
After thirteen minutes, his tone abruptly shifted as he at last got to his point.
“No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” Comey said. “No charges are appropriate in this case.”
Patrice said to herself, Jeez, Jim, why did you take so long to say that?
“If I had led with th
e exoneration,” Comey would say, “nobody would have listened to anything else.”
In reaction to the press conference, the Clinton campaign made a strategic decision to embrace the director’s conclusions. Although they saw Comey as arrogant and out of line for holding the press conference and criticizing Clinton, they ultimately decided that there was no good reason to pick a fight with the head of the FBI in the middle of a presidential campaign. Instead of litigating that in the media and attacking Jim, they moved on. The rest of the Democratic Party fell into line behind the Clintons.
In fact, many top Democratic leaders praised Jim for how he handled the Clinton investigation.
“This is a great man,” the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, said about Comey shortly after the press conference. “We are very privileged in our country to have him be the director of the FBI.”
Tim Kaine, the Virginia senator Clinton would choose as her running mate, would say on the campaign trail that Comey displayed the “highest standards of integrity.”
One of the few Democrats who went public to criticize Jim was a former Department of Justice spokesman who was known only to Washington insiders. The former spokesman, Matt Miller, took to cable news to say Jim had broken Justice Department rules. Miller said that it was not the department’s practice to use the fruits of an investigation to go out and tarnish the reputation of someone who has no ability to defend herself in court. If the department found wrongdoing, it should bring charges; otherwise, it should say nothing. Miller wrote a Washington Post op-ed titled “James Comey’s Abuse of Power” that claimed that by going public, Comey had set a dangerous precedent.
“Generations of prosecutors and agents have learned to make the right call without holding a self-congratulatory news conference to talk about it,” Miller wrote. “Comey just taught them a different lesson.”
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