A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

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.”