A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

America is a country that, by most historical measures, shouldn’t exist. Americans don’t come from a common heritage, language, religion, or culture. We have none of the normal glue to form this collection of humans from across the globe into a nation. Instead, we are an experiment: For two-and-a-half centuries, we have been held together by a set of values. Of course, we have always fallen short of our espoused values

Unfortunately, that line marking our continual upward progress is not a straight one. If you look closely, it is actually a jagged line.

Without a fundamental commitment to the truth—especially in our public institutions and those who lead them—we are lost.

A commitment to integrity and a higher loyalty to truth are what separate the ethical leader from those who just happen to occupy leadership roles.

Appearing in front of members of Congress was difficult on a good day, and usually disheartening. Nearly everyone appeared to take a side and seemed to listen only to find the nuggets that fit their desired spin. They would argue with each other through you: “Mr. Director, if someone said X, wouldn’t that person be an idiot?” And the reply would come through you as well: “Mr. Director, if someone said that someone who said X was an idiot, wouldn’t that person be the real idiot?”

Funny, and true.

It is famous for its energy and its expansive sense of its own ability to bring cases. The office has long been accused of considering only one question relevant to its claims of jurisdiction: “Did it happen on the earth?” I

Re: The Southern District of NY

All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them.

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.

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.

We really can’t always tell when people are lying or hiding documents, so when we are able to prove it, we simply must do so as a message to everyone. People must fear the consequences of lying in the justice system or the system can’t work.

He is talking about the Martha Stewart case

The law prohibiting the disclosure of the identity of a covert intelligence agent required specific and evil intent.

Re: Valerie Plame

The credibility of the Department of Justice is its bedrock. The American people must see the administration of justice as independent of politics, race, class, religion, or any of the many other things that divide humans into tribes.

Re: Valerie Plame outing

we were deeply skeptical of what we were told about the effectiveness of the CIA’s coercive tactics. It struck me as the kind of stuff pushed by chicken hawks—aggressive-sounding administration officials who had seen plenty of movies but had never actually been in the storm.

This was during the Bush Administration, when the debate over torture arose

In a complicated, changing, and integrated world, our confirmation bias makes us very difficult people. We simply can’t change our minds.

The FBI should be independent and totally divorced from politics, which was what the ten-year term for a director was designed to ensure.

When President Obama hired Comey to lead FBI

The best leaders don’t care much about “benchmarking,” comparing their organization to others. They know theirs is not good enough, and constantly push to get better.

Great quote about leadership

history of the FBI’s interaction with King, how the legitimate counterintelligence mission against Communist infiltration of our government had morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack on the civil rights leader and others. I wanted them to remember that well-meaning people lost their way.

We knew that the Department of Justice would never bring—and had never brought—criminal charges in such a situation without strong evidence that the subject of our investigation knew she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing. Accidents, sloppiness, and even extreme carelessness with regard to classified information were not things that were prosecuted. Ever.

Re: Hillary Clinton using private email for State Dept. business

Bill Clinton were going to try to influence the attorney general, he wouldn’t do it by walking across a busy tarmac, in broad daylight, and up a flight of stairs past a group of FBI special agents. Besides, Lynch wasn’t running the investigation anyway.

Clinton’s account, she was unsophisticated both about technology and security, used the personal account for convenience to avoid maintaining dual government and personal email accounts,

After discussion and careful review of her answers, there was nothing in her comments that we could prove was a lie beyond a reasonable doubt.

Evidence within the intelligence community strongly suggested that the Russian government was trying to interfere in the election in three ways.

1. Doubt in democratic process 2. Hurt Hillary Clinton (Russia was angry about her for admonishing them over Crimea) 3. Help Donald Trump

As with the Clinton email investigation, for months the Bureau resisted all calls from reporters and other outside observers to confirm an investigation was under way.

If you tell Americans that the Russians are tampering with the election, have you just sowed doubt about the outcome, or given one side an excuse for why they lost? This was very tricky. President Obama saw the dilemma clearly and said he was determined not to help the Russians achieve their goal of undermining faith in our process. The administration continued to consider the idea of inoculation and what that might look like.

Why risk undermining faith in our electoral process, he seemed to conclude, when the Russian efforts were making no difference? And why give Donald Trump the excuse to blame Obama for frightening the American people? He was going to lose anyway.

To remain silent at this point, while taking the step of getting a search warrant to review thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, including possibly the missing early emails, would be an affirmative act of concealment, which would mean the director of the FBI had misled—and was continuing to mislead—Congress and the American people.

the credibility of the institutions of justice was at stake. Assuming, as nearly everyone did, that Hillary Clinton would be elected president of the United States in less than two weeks,

I said in testimony, the very idea that my decision had any impact on the outcome leaves me feeling mildly nauseous (or, as one of my grammatically minded daughters later corrected me, “nauseated”).

He said lots of people wanted to be director of the FBI, but that he thought very highly of me. He said he had heard great things about me and knew the people of the FBI thought very highly of me as well.

When Donald Trump first met Comey after the election

the president doesn’t understand the FBI’s role in American life or care about what the people there spent forty years building.

Ethical leaders never ask for loyalty. Those leading through fear—like a Cosa Nostra boss—require personal loyalty.

including that the FBI was not exactly a secret cabal of Clinton lovers. Although special agents are trained to check their politics at the door, they tend to lean to the right side of the political spectrum—and McCabe had long considered himself a Republican.

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 make wise decisions. That makes me sad for him, but it makes me worry for our country.

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 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