A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

There was little common ground. It was like having Thanksgiving dinner with a family eating together by court order.

Standing for something. Making a difference. That is true wealth.

“I’m so glad I went to a big law firm” is not something you hear often, but I am.

“The most dangerous place in New York is between Rudy and a microphone.”

a leader needs the truth, but an emperor does not consistently hear it from his underlings.

MAFIA MEMBERS MAY DRESS and talk in distinctive ways, but they are part of a fairly common species—the bully. All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them. I know. I’ve seen it up close.

Had my family stayed in Yonkers, where I was a cool kid, where I was part of a group, I don’t know what kind of person I would be now. Being an outsider, being picked on, was very painful, but it made me a better person. It instilled in me a lifelong hatred for bullies and sympathy for their victims.

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.

Federal investigators usually aren’t big believers in coincidences.

Everything was written in one brand of ink, except for the part that bolstered Stewart’s claims.

Really hard. Not impossible, thanks to the twentieth century’s great gift to law enforcement—electronic communications—but still hard.

lying. I have left his name out of my book because I hope he has made a good and happy life after prison.

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.

I am very confident that, should the circumstance arise, Martha Stewart would not lie to federal investigators again. Unfortunately, many others who crossed my path

people are at their most dangerous when they are certain that their cause is just and their facts are right.

fairness to the president and vice president, our modern culture makes this incredibly hard for leaders—especially those in government—even if they possess enough confidence to be humble. Admitting doubt or mistakes is career suicide.

The best leaders are both kind and tough. Without both, people don’t thrive. Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio, believes there is no such thing as negative feedback or positive feedback; there is only accurate feedback, and we should care enough about each other to be accurate.

Effective leaders almost never need to yell. The leader will have created an environment where disappointing him causes his people to be disappointed in themselves.

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.

But transparency is almost always the best course. Getting problems, pain, hopes, and doubts out on the table so we can talk honestly about them and work to improve is the best way to lead. By acknowledging our issues, we

Despite the endless drumbeat in the conservative media, filled with exaggerated scandals and breathless revelations of little practical import, Hillary Clinton’s case, at least as far as we knew at the start, did not appear to come anywhere near General Petraeus’s in the volume and classification level of the material mishandled.

Experienced investigators always avoid conducting interviews with subjects who know more about the facts than they do. That knowledge imbalance favors the subject, not the investigator. Especially in white-collar crime cases, investigators prefer to master all of the facts before questioning the subject, so that interrogators can ask smart questions and so the subject can be confronted, as necessary, with documents or statements made by other witnesses.

For my entire career, intelligence was a thing of mine and political spin a thing of yours. Team Trump wanted to change that.

The president of the United States had invited me to dinner and decided my job security was on the menu.

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.

What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay.