A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

I’ve seen many times over the years how liars get so good at lying, they lose the ability to distinguish between what’s true and what’s not. They surround themselves with other liars. The circle becomes closer and smaller, with those unwilling to surrender their moral compasses pushed out and those willing to tolerate deceit brought closer to the center of power. Perks and access are given to those willing to lie and tolerate lies. This creates a culture, which becomes an entire way of life.

If federal agents burst into a hotel room and find a kilo of heroin piled in the middle of a table, everybody sitting at that table is going to jail. It isn’t open to any of them to say it had never occurred to them that this activity was illegal, or that their accountants and lawyers had reviewed the heroin and concluded it was lawful and appropriate under governing rules and regulations. Nope. Everybody is going to jail. In a corporate fraud case, the challenge was reversed. At the end of the day, the government would understand the transactions completely. We would know who was sitting at the table and exactly what the deal was. But everybody at the table would say they had absolutely no idea this complicated, mortgage-backed, reverse-repo, foreign-exchange-swap transaction was illegal. They would invariably say they were deeply, deeply sorry people had lost their life savings, but committing a crime was the furthest thing from their minds. It fell to investigators and prosecutors to prove the content of a person’s mind beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of twelve, who must unanimously agree that the government met its burden. Really hard. Not impossible, thanks to the twentieth century’s great gift to law enforcement—electronic communications—but still hard.

In that moment, something hit me: It’s just us. I always thought that in this place there would be somebody better, but it’s just this group of people—including me—trying to figure stuff out. I didn’t mean that as an insult to any of the participants, who were talented people. But we were just people, ordinary people in extraordinary roles in challenging times. I’m not sure what I had expected, but I met the top of the pyramid and it was just us, which was both comforting and a bit frightening. Suddenly Bob Dylan was in my head, singing, “What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.”

The president, the vice president, and those around them also labored under our political culture, where uncertainty is intolerable, where doubt is derided as weakness. Then and now, leaders feel a special pressure to be certain, a pressure that reinforces their natural confirmation bias.

I learned there that I could sometimes be a selfish and poor leader. Most often, that was because I was hesitant to tell people who worked for me when I thought they needed to improve. The best leaders are both kind and tough. Without both, people don’t thrive. Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio, believes there is no such thing as negative feedback or positive feedback; there is only accurate feedback, and we should care enough about each other to be accurate.

Harry Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Humans tend to do the same dumb things, and the same evil things, again and again, because we forget.

One of my weaknesses, especially when I was younger, was overconfidence, a tendency to reach a conclusion quickly and cling to it too tightly. Or to make a decision too quickly, telling myself I was being “decisive,” when I was really being impulsive and arrogant. I have struggled with it my entire life.

If people are formally dressed, they will think and act in that formal, restrictive box. That is not a recipe for great debate and conversations.