A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

Evil has an ordinary face. It laughs, it cries, it deflects, it rationalizes, it makes great pasta.

We all have a tendency to surrender our moral authority to “the group,” to still our own voices and assume that the group will handle whatever difficult issue we face. We imagine that the group is making thoughtful decisions, and if the crowd is moving in a certain direction, we follow, as if the group is some moral entity larger than ourselves. In the face of the herd, our tendency is to go quiet and let the group’s brain and soul handle things. Of course, the group has no brain or soul separate from each of ours. But by imagining that the group has these centers, we abdicate responsibility, which allows all groups to be hijacked by the loudest voice, the person who knows how brainless groups really are and uses that to his advantage.

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.

As strange as it might sound, there is a certain freedom in being totally screwed, in knowing you will be attacked no matter what you do. Half the country will howl either way, so tune out the critics and let only the facts and the law dictate which half. At the time, of course, it never occurred to me that our decisions could outrage both halves.

Friendship, connections, family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience—this was the glue that held us together. —MAFIA BOSS JOSEPH BONANNO, IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MAN OF HONOR

That distracted me slightly because I immediately began wondering why his wife would think there was any chance, even a small one, that he had been with prostitutes urinating on each other in Moscow. For all my flaws, there is a zero percent chance—literally absolute zero—that Patrice would credit an allegation that I was with hookers peeing on each other in Moscow. She would laugh at the very suggestion.

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 know there are men and women of good conscience in the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle who understand this. But not enough of them are speaking out. They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity—it is a choice—and somewhere deep down they must know that.