A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

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.