A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

sometimes it isn’t when we face death ourselves, but rather when death takes away those we love the most, that we really learn about just how short our time on earth is and why what we do with that time matters.

Cheney then expressed a frustration that was entirely reasonable. He pointed out that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel had written a memo to support the program in 2001 and that the attorney general had repeatedly certified the program’s legality in the two and one-half years since. How can you now switch positions on something so important? he asked. I sympathized with him and told him so, but I added that the 2001 opinion was so bad as to be “facially invalid.” I said, “No lawyer could rely upon it.” From the windowsill came Addington’s cutting voice: “I’m a lawyer and I did.” I didn’t break eye contact with the vice president. “No good lawyer,” I added.

DONALD J. TRUMP WAS inaugurated the forty-fifth president of the United States on January 20, 2017, before a crowd whose number immediately and famously came into dispute. The new president was determined to demonstrate that the number of spectators who turned out for him, which was sizable, surpassed the number of people present for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. They did not. No evidence, photographic or otherwise, would move him off his view, which, as far as everyone but his press team seemed to agree, was simply false. This small moment was deeply disconcerting to those of us in the business of trying to find the truth, whether in a criminal investigation or in assessing the plans and intentions of America’s adversaries. Much of life is ambiguous and subject to interpretation, but there are things that are objectively, verifiably either true or false. It was simply not true that the biggest crowd in history attended the inauguration, as he asserted, or even that Trump’s crowd was bigger than Obama’s. To say otherwise was not to offer an opinion, a view, a perspective. It was a lie.

“They write these things out one at a time, by hand,” he marveled, referring to the White House staff. “A calligrapher,” I replied, nodding. He looked quizzical. “They write them by hand,” he repeated.

Now it was pretty clear to me what was happening. The setup of the dinner, both the physical layout of a private meal and Trump’s pretense that he had not already asked me to stay on multiple occasions, convinced me this was an effort to establish a patronage relationship. Somebody probably had told him, or maybe it just occurred to him at random, that he’d “given” me the job for “free” and that he needed to get something in return. This only added to the strangeness of the experience. The president of the United States had invited me to dinner and decided my job security was on the menu.

A short time later, with a serious look on his face, he said, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.” During the silence that followed, I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way. The president of the United States just demanded the FBI director’s loyalty. This was surreal. To those inclined to defend Trump, they might consider how it would have looked if President Obama had called the FBI director to a one-on-one dinner during an investigation of senior officials in his administration, then discussed his job security, and then said he expected loyalty. There would undoubtedly be people appearing on Fox News calling for Obama’s impeachment in an instant. This, of course, was not something I could ever conceive of Obama doing, or George W. Bush, for that matter. To my mind, the demand was like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony—with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a “made man.” I did not, and would never. I was determined not to give the president any hint of assent to this demand, so I gave silence instead. We looked at each other for what seemed an eternity, but was maybe two seconds or so. I stared again at the soft white pouches under his expressionless blue eyes. I remember thinking in that moment that the president doesn’t understand the FBI’s role in American life or care about what the people there spent forty years building. Not at all.

As we continued our encounter—I don’t use the word “conversation,” because the term doesn’t apply when one person speaks nearly the entire time—I tried again to help President Trump understand the value that the separation between the FBI and the White House offers the president. But it was very hard to get a word in. For the rest of the meal, pausing only now and then to eat, he spoke in torrents, gushing words about the size of his inauguration crowd, how much free media coverage he had been able to generate during the election, the viciousness of the campaign. He offered his view of the Clinton email investigation, referring to it in three phases, each of which, in his telling, bore my name. In “Comey One,” he said, I “saved her” with my July 5 announcement that there was no prosecutable case against her. Although he added that I was wrong about that conclusion. In what he called “Comey Two,” I did what I had to do by informing Congress that we had restarted the investigation. In “Comey Three,” which was my final letter to Congress, closing the case for a second time, he said I saved Hillary again, but that she “totally misplayed” that. He sounded like he was reciting the plotline to his favorite TV show.

He talked about the trappings of the White House, saying something to the effect of “This is luxury. And I know luxury.” I remember glancing again at the one poor statue I could see over his shoulder with the mantelpiece on its head and thinking that made sense. He went into another explanation—I’d seen many of them on television—about how he hadn’t made fun of a disabled reporter. He said he hadn’t mistreated a long list of women, reviewing each case in detail, as he had in our earlier conversation. There was no way he groped that lady sitting next to him on the airplane, he insisted. And the idea that he grabbed a porn star and offered her money to come to his room was preposterous. His method of speaking was like an oral jigsaw puzzle contest, with a shot clock. He would, in rapid-fire sequence, pick up a piece, put it down, pick up an unrelated piece, put it down, return to the original piece, on and on. But it was always him picking up the pieces and putting them down. None of this behavior, incidentally, was the way a leader could or should build rapport with a subordinate.

whatever people were feeling—happy, sad, frightened, or confused—it was unlikely it had anything to do with me. They had received a gift, or lost a friend, or gotten a medical test result, or couldn’t understand why their love wasn’t calling them back. It was all about their lives, their troubles, their hopes and dreams. Not mine. The nature of human existence makes it hard for us—or at least for me—to come to that understanding naturally. After all, I can only experience the world through me. That tempts all of us to believe everything we think, everything we hear, everything we see, is all about us. I think we all do this.

But a leader constantly has to train him- or herself to think otherwise. This is an important insight for a leader, in two respects. First, it allows you to relax a bit, secure in the knowledge that you aren’t that important. Second, knowing people aren’t always focused on you should drive you to try to imagine what they are focused on. I see this as the heart of emotional intelligence, the ability to imagine the feelings and perspective of another “me.” Some seem to be born with a larger initial deposit of emotional intelligence, but all of us can develop it with practice. Well, most of us. I got the sense that no one ever taught this to Donald Trump.

The president asked very few questions that might prompt a discussion. Instead he made constant assertions, leaving me wondering whether by my silence I had just agreed with “everyone” that he had the biggest inauguration crowd in history, had given a great inauguration speech, had never mistreated women, and so on. The barrage ...

Then there were the baffling, unnecessary lies. At one point, for example, the president told me that Chief of Staff Reince Priebus didn’t know we were meeting, which seemed incredible. A chief of staff should know when the president is dining alone with the FBI director. Then, later...

Unprompted, and in another zag in the conversation, he brought up what he called the “golden showers thing,” repeating much of what he had said to me previously, adding that it bothered him if there was “even a one percent chance” his wife, Melania, thought it was true. 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 w...

I’m almost certain the president is unfamiliar with the proverb “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” because he just rolled on, unprompted, explaining why it couldn’t possibly be true, ending by saying he was thinking of asking me to investigate the allegation to prove it was a lie. I said it was up to him. At the same time, I expressed the concern that such a thing would create a narrative that we were investigating him personally and added that it is also very difficult to pr...

One of his few questions, again seemingly out of nowhere, was to ask me how I compared Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. I explained that Holder was much closer to President Obama, which had its advantages and its perils. I used the opportunity as an excuse to again explain why it was so important that the FBI and the Department of Justice be independent of the White House. I said it was a paradox: Throughout history, some presidents have decided that because “problems” come from Justice, they should try to hold the department close. But blurring those boundaries ultimately makes...

Something else occurred to me about President Trump at that dinner that I found very instructive. I don’t recall seeing him laugh, ever. Not during small talk before meetings. Not in a conversation. Not even here, during an ostensibly relaxed dinner. Months later, the thought of a man whom I had never seen laugh stayed with me. I wondered if maybe others had noticed it or if in thousands of hours of video coverage, he had ever laughed. He had spent literally decades in front of video cameras, between his highly choreographed career as a business mogul and his years as a reality television star. So, out of curiosity, I googled it and looked through YouTube videos. In all of my searching, I found one video of something that could be called Donald Trump exhibiting a laugh, and a mean one at that—in January 2016, when he asked a New Hampshire audience about the origin of a noise in the background that sounded like a dog barking and someone shouted: “It’s Hillary.” There is a risk that I’m overinterpreting this, and I suppose it’s possible that in private he may keep his wife or children or some favorite staff member in stitches or that I have missed a collection of his public laughs...

Near the end of our dinner, he asked another question—the first that was actually an effort to learn something about his guest. He wondered how I ended up as FBI director. In answering, I told him I had been pleasantly surprised that President Obama thought of the job as I did: he wanted competence and independence, and didn’t want the FBI involved in policy but wanted to sleep at night knowing the FBI was well run. I recounted our first discussion in the Oval Office together, which, even in that moment, occurred to me as the polar opposite of what was unfolding at this dinner. President Trump replied by saying he was happy I wanted to stay because he had heard such great things about me from so many people, including his picks for secretary of defense and attorney general. He then returned to the issue of loyalty, saying again, “I need loyalty.” I paused, again. “You will always get honesty from me,” I said. He paused. “That’s what I want, honest loyalty,” ...

In that moment, something else occurred to me: The “leader of the free world,” the self-described great business tycoon, didn’t understand leadership. Ethical leaders never ask for loyalty. Those leading through fear—like a Cosa Nostra boss—require personal loyalty. Ethical leaders care deeply about those they lead, and offer them honesty and decency, commitment and their own sacrifice. They have a confidence that breeds humility. Ethical leaders know their own talent but fear their own limitations—to understand and reason, to see the world as it is and not as they wish it to be. They speak the truth and know that making wise decisions requires people to tell them the truth. And to get that truth, they create an environment of high standar...

After dessert—two scoops of ice cream, for each of us—I went home and wrote a memo about the dinner, which quickly became my practice with President Trump after occasions when we spoke alone. I had never done something like that before in my conversations with other presidents, and didn’t write memos as FBI director about encounters with any other person, but a number of factors made it seem prudent to do so with this president. For one, we were touching on topics that involved the FBI’s responsibilities and the president personally, and I was discussing those things with a person whose integrity I had come to seriously doubt after watching him campaign for president and since. I needed to protect the FBI and myself because I couldn’t trust this person to tell the truth about our conversations. As was my practice, I printed two copies of the memo. One I shared with the FBI senior leadership team and then had my chief of staff keep in his files. The other I lo...

I did not know Priebus well. He often seemed both confused and irritated, and it was not hard to imagine why. Running the Trump White House would be a difficult job for even an experienced manager, which Priebus wasn’t. Previously chairman of the Republican National Committee and before that a Wisconsin lawyer, Priebus had never served in the federal government. How could someone like that—or anyone, for that matter—manage someone like Donald Trump? I have no idea. But Priebus seemed to be trying.

Though this was not the first time I’d seen the new president, it was the first time I had seen him in his new office. He didn’t look comfortable. He was sitting, suit jacket on, close against the famous Resolute desk, both forearms on the desk. As a result, he was separated from everyone who spoke to him by a large block of wood. In dozens of meetings in that space with Presidents Bush and Obama, I cannot recall ever seeing them stationed at their desk. They instead sat in an armchair by the fireplace and held meetings in a more open, casual arrangement. That made sense to me. As hard as it is to get people to relax and open up with a president, the chances are much better in the sitting area, where we can pretend we are friends gathered around a coffee table. There, the president can try to be one of a group, and draw the others out to tell him the truth. But when the president sits on a throne, protected by a large wooden obstacle, as Trump routinely did in my interactions with him, the formality of the Oval Office is magnified and the chances of getting the full truth plummet.

As Trump kept talking, I could see he was convincing himself of this story line and clearly thought he was convincing us, too. Of course, I didn’t think O’Reilly’s question was hard, or Trump’s answer good, but this wasn’t about him seeking feedback. In fact, by this point, I had dealt with the president enough to have something of a read on what Trump was doing. His assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our dinner, because he never stops talking. As a result, Trump pulls all those present into a silent circle of assent. With him talking a mile a minute, with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, I could see how easily everyone in the room could become a coconspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. But as Martin Luther once said, “You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.”

As I sat there, I watched the president building with his words a cocoon of alternative reality that he was busily wrapping around all of us. I must have agreed that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history, as he asserted in our previous meetings, because I didn’t challenge that. I must therefore agree that his interview with O’Reilly was great, his answers brilliant, because I sat there and didn’t object. But I’d be damned if I was going to let this trick work on me again. And this time he gave me the opening. Looking at me, he said, “You think it was a great answer, right?” and started to move on. I jumped on it and did something I might never have done as a younger person—especially to a president of the United States. Something I’d never seen anyone else do around Trump in the limited number of interactions I’d had with him. I can’t remember if it was midsentence or in a brief pause before he launched into the next set of assertions to which we were all supposed to agree, but I interrupted his monologue. “The first part of your answer was fine, Mr. President,” I said, as he took a breath and looked at me with a blank expression. “But not the second part. We aren’t the kind of killers that Putin is.”

At that remark, Trump stopped talking altogether. In that brightly lit room, with its shiny gold curtains, a shadow seemed to cross his face. I could see something change in his eyes. A hardness, or darkness. In a blink, the eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. He looked like someone who wasn’t used to being challenged or corrected by those around him. He was the one who was supposed to be in complete control. With a small comment, I had just poured a cold dose of criticism and reality on his shameful moral equivalence between Putin’s thugs and the men and women of our government. And just as quickly as the glower crossed his face, it was gone. It was as if I had not spoken, and had never been born. The meet...

the encounter left me shaken. I had never seen anything like it in the Oval Office. As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.

The new attorney general had been in office less than a week at that point. My first impressions of him were that he was eerily similar to Alberto Gonzales—both overwhelmed and overmatched by the job—but Sessions lacked the kindness Gonzales radiated.

The president seemed oddly uninterested and distracted during the classified briefing. I had some concerning and important things to say about the current terrorism threat inside the United States, but they drew no reaction. At the end of the low-energy session, he signaled that the briefing was over. “Thanks, everybody,” he said in a loud voice. Then, pointing at me, he added, “I just want to talk to Jim. Thanks, everybody.” Here we go again. I didn’t know what he wanted to talk about, but this request was so unusual that I suspected another memo lay in my immediate future.

The president then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that General Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the vice president. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” At the time, I had understood the president to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the president to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency. Imagine the reaction if a President Hillary Clinton had asked to speak to the FBI director alone and urged him to back off the investigation of her national security advisor.

I did not interrupt the president to protest that what he was asking was inappropriate, as I probably should have. But if he didn’t know what he was doing was inappropriate, why had he just ejected everyone, including my boss and the vice president, from the room so he could speak with me alone?

In a little over a month, I had now written multiple memos about encounters with Donald Trump. I knew I would need to remember these conversations both because of their content and because I knew I was dealing with a chief executive who might well lie about them. To protect the FBI, and myself, I needed a contemporaneous record.

When the room was clear, I did what I had promised the president and passed along his concerns about leaks and his expectation that we would be aggressive in pursuing them. Under the optimistic assumption that the attorney general had any control over President Trump, I then took the opportunity to implore him to prevent any future one-on-one communications between the president and me. “That can’t happen,” I said. “You are my boss. You can’t be kicked out of the room so he can talk to me alone. You have to be between me and the president.” He didn’t ask me whether anything happened that troubled me, and I didn’t say, for reasons discussed above. Instead, in a move that would become familiar to me, Sessions cast his eyes down at the table, and they darted quickly back and forth, side to side. To my memory, he said nothing. After a brief moment of eye darting, he put both hands on the table and stood, thanking me for coming. I read in his posture and face a message that he would not be able to help me. Rybicki and I left. I was so thrown by the silent eye darting that I had Rybicki follow up with a call to Sessions’s chief of staff to make sure he understood my concern and the importance of the attorney general’s shielding me from the president. His chief of staff said they got it. But they didn’t. Or couldn’t.

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.

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.

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 Hillary 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 mak...

Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty. We are fortunate some ethical leaders have chosen to serve and to stay at senior levels of government, but they cannot prevent all of the damage from the forest fire that is the Trump presidency. Their task is to try to contain it.

I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while deemphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and morally wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I’ve said this earlier but it’s worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, “I hope you will let it go,” about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to almost be darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay.

Policies come and go. Supreme Court justices come and go. But the core of our nation is our commitment to a set of shared values that began with George Washington—to restraint and integrity and balance and transparency and truth. If that slides away from us, only a fool would be consoled by a tax cut or a different immigration policy.