A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country, with a political environment where basic facts are disputed, fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized, and unethical behavior is ignored, excused, or rewarded.

Ethical leaders do not run from criticism, especially self-criticism, and they don’t hide from uncomfortable questions. They welcome them.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

He asked me not to overreact and said the White House was committed to working with us. I don’t know whether I overreacted, but I sure reacted, and very strongly. The memo was a big middle finger, clearly written by Addington. It said we were wrong about everything, and acting inappropriately by usurping presidential authority. It rejected all our proposed changes, saying they were unnecessary legally and factually. It said nothing about our mothers being whores, but it might as well have.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. —MARK TWAIN

The CIA leadership, and the powerful administration officials who backed them up, like Vice President Dick Cheney, held a starkly different view. They were driven by one of the most powerful and disconcerting forces in human nature—confirmation bias.

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.

First, I said, we in law enforcement need to acknowledge the truth that we have long been the enforcers of a status quo in America that abused black people; we need to acknowledge our history because the people we serve and protect cannot forget it. Second, we all need to acknowledge that we carry implicit biases inside us, and if we aren’t careful, they can lead to assumptions and injustice. Third, something can happen to people in law enforcement who must respond to incidents resulting in the arrest of so many young men of color; it can warp perspectives and lead to cynicism. Finally, I said, we all must acknowledge that the police are not the root cause of the most challenging problems in our country’s worst neighborhoods, but that the actual causes and solutions are so hard that it is easier to talk only about the police.

Until I met my wife, I didn’t know what listening really was. Neither, at least in my experience, do most people in Washington, D.C. To them, listening is a period of silence, where someone else talks before you say what you were planning to say all along. We see these exchanges in nearly every “debate” on television. It’s the candidate sitting on the stool, waiting for the light to go on, then standing up and saying their prearranged talking points, while someone else says their prearranged talking points back at them. It’s just words reaching ears, but not getting into a conscious brain. That’s the “Washington listen.”

First, they sought to undermine confidence in the American democratic enterprise—to dirty us up so that our election process would no longer be an inspiration to the rest of the world. Second, the Russians wanted to hurt Hillary Clinton. Putin hated her, blaming her personally for large street demonstrations against him in Moscow in December 2011. Putin believed Clinton had given “a signal” to demonstrators by publicly criticizing what she called “troubling practices” before and during the parliamentary vote in Russia that year. She said, “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted.” Putin took that as an unforgivable personal attack. Third, Putin wanted to help Donald Trump win. Trump had been saying favorable things about the Russian government and Putin had shown a long-standing appreciation for business leaders who cut deals rather than stand on principle.

“That Comey is such a political hack. I just can’t figure out which party.”

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.

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.

Thomas Jefferson was right when he wrote: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

Yes, the current president will do significant damage in the short term. Important norms and traditions will be damaged by the flames. But forest fires, as painful as they can be, bring growth. They spur growth that was impossible before the fire, when old trees crowded out new plants on the forest floor.