A Higher Loyalty

James Comey, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” Flatiron Books, 2018, 277 pp.

James Comey must have done something right:  both the Democrats and Republicans have been criticizing him. In “A Higher Loyalty,” the former F.B.I. director calls the Trump presidency a “forest fire” that is doing serious damage to the country’s norms and traditions.  “This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values,” Comey writes. “His leadership is transactional, ego-driven and about personal loyalty.”

Decades before, Comey was a career prosecutor who helped dismantle the Gambino crime family; and he sees similarities in the current occupant of the Oval Office. “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.” Dishonesty, he writes, was central “to the entire enterprise of organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic,” and so, too, were bullying, peer pressure, and groupthink — repellent traits shared by Trump and company, he suggests, and now infecting our culture.

This book gives the reader what Comey was thinking when, as he’s previously said, Trump demanded loyalty from him during a one-on-one dinner at the White House; when Trump pressured him to let go of the investigation into his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn; and when the president asked what Comey could do to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation.

There are some explanations in these pages of the reasoning behind the decisions Comey made regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign — explanations that attest to his nonpartisan and well-intentioned efforts to protect the independence of the F.B.I.  This portion is a must read considering the IG condemnation of Comey for not following procedure just released on 6/14/18. 

“A Higher Loyalty” also provides sketches of key players in three presidential administrations. Comey draws a scathing portrait of Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal adviser David S. Addington, who spearheaded the arguments of many hard-liners in the George W. Bush White House; Comey describes their point of view: “The war on terrorism justified stretching, if not breaking, the written law.” He depicts Bush national security adviser and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as uninterested in having a detailed policy discussion of interrogation policy and the question of torture. He takes Barack Obama’s attorney general Loretta Lynch to task for asking him to refer to the Clinton email case as a “matter,” not an “investigation.” And he compares Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to Alberto R. Gonzales, who served in the same position under Bush, writing that both were “overwhelmed and overmatched by the job,” but “Sessions lacked the kindness Gonzales radiated.”

Trump was reportedly infuriated by Comey’s “nauseous” remark; less than a week later he fired the F.B.I. director — an act regarded by some legal scholars as possible evidence of obstruction of justice, and that quickly led to the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller and an even bigger cloud over the White House.

My Notes:

Pg. 15:  Comey graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1985.  He joined the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan in 1987 working for Rudy Giuliani.

Pg. 28:  Comey, in 1991, spent evenings meeting with Sammy the Bull Gravano in a safe house after Gravano had previously testified in court against family boss John Gotti, where defense lawyers made much of Sammy’s involvement in nineteen homicides.  La Cosa Nostra’s grip on unions was broken through the many investigations carried out at this time.  The Mafia leaders were jailed, its grip on unions was broken, and its dominance on both sides of the Atlantic shattered. 

Pg. 63:  In 1995 Comey worked briefly for the Senate committee investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investments in an Arkansas development called Whitewater.  One issue involved the suicide of President Clinton’s deputy White House counsel Vince Foster and the subsequent handling of documents left in his office.  One of the questions the committee had was whether Hillary or anyone acting on her behalf went to Foster’s office after his death and removed documents.  Comey left the investigation long before any conclusions were reached.

Pg. 72:  Scooter Libby not only lied about his interaction with Tim Russert, claiming that he’d heard the covert agent’s name from him, but eight Bush administration officials testified that they talked to Libby about the covert agent’s name.  More evidence revealed that Libby had proactively discussed the CIA employee with reporters, at the vice president’s request, to ‘push back’ on stories critical of the administration’s basis for invading Iraq. 

Pg. 74:  On March 10, 2004, Comey was acting attorney general of the US on behalf of an ailing John Ashcroft who was in the hospital with acute pancreatitis, so severe that it had immobilized him with pain in the ICU.  President Bush’s call to Ashcroft was refused by Ashcroft’s wife as her husband was too sick.  Bush then told her he was sending his counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and his chief of staff, Andrew Card, to the hospital to discuss a vital matter of national security with her husband.  She immediately alerted Ayres, who called Comey.  Comey rushed to the hospital to prevent Bush White House officials from persuading the ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize an N.S.A. surveillance program that members of the Justice Department believed violated the law. 

Pg. 101:  In April 2004 the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced which precipitated a DOJ review of the interrogation program.  They concluded that earlier legal work supporting the interrogation program was deeply flawed.  This led to another battle within the Bush administration between a secret policy agenda and the rule of law. 

Pg. 102f:  In 1994, Congress had decided, as a legal matter, to define ‘torture’ differently from how most of us understand the term.  Congress defined ‘torture’ for American law as the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical pain or suffering.  There is a whole lot that most of us would call torture that falls short of ‘severe pain’ or ‘severe suffering.’  Most of us would think that confining someone in a dark, coffin-like box or chaining them naked to the ceiling for days without sleep is torture.  But the way Congress chose to define it, by requiring that the pain and suffering be ‘severe,’ a judge or lawyer could conclude those actions do not meet the legal definition of torture.  Comey could not influence a change, so he left government service.  He worked as the chief lawyer at the defense contractor Lockheed Martin for five years, and then at an investment firm for three.  In 2013 he joined the faculty at Columbia Law School.  But that March Attorney General Eric Holder called to ask whether he would interview for FBI director and he was officially sworn in as the seventh director of the FBI on September 4, 2013 (a ten-year appointment).

Pg. 159:  In 2002 Comey’s office was supervising an investigation into Clinton’s pardon of fugitive oil trader Marc Rich (in 2001).  In 1983, Rich had been indicted on sixty-five criminal counts by then—United States Attorney Rudy Giuliani.  Among the counts were income tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and trading with an enemy of the US—Iran—while it held dozens of Americans hostage.  Rich fled the US shortly before the indictment.  He was given safe haven in Switzerland, which refused to extradite him.  Nearly two decades later, on his final day in office, President Clinton had issued Rich a highly unusual pardon.  Unusual because the pardon was given to a fugitive, which was unprecedented.  It also had not gone through the normal review process at the DOJ.  The pardon had only been seen by Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, who, without seeking input from the prosecutors or agents who knew the case, cryptically told the White House he was ‘neutral, leaning positive.’  Because of allegation the pardon had been issued in exchange for promised of contributions by Marc Rich’s ex-wife to Bill Clinton’s presidential library.  When Comey became the US Attorney in January 2002, he inherited the investigation.  In the end, Comey did not find sufficient evidence to bring any charges and closed the case.

Pg. 161ff:  Hillary Clinton Emails:  Much has been made of Hillary’s emails and the FBI’s investigation; however, the focus of the Bureau’s investigation is often lost. The criminal investigation was not centered on the fact Clinton decided to use nongovernmental email to do her work.  In an attempt to blunt the seriousness of the case, her defenders often cite the fact that Colin Powell also used nongovernmental email, in his case AOL, as if that were relevant to the investigation.  In fact, it entirely misses the point.  Comey never saw any indication that Powell discussed on his AOL account information that was classified at the time, but there were numerous examples of Clinton having done so.  The investigation requires answers to two questions.  The first was whether classified documents were moved outside of classified systems or whether classified topics were discussed outside of a classified system.  If so, what was the subject of the investigation thinking when she mishandled that classified information?

In Secretary Clinton’s case, classified information was mishandled.  In all, there were thirty-six email chains that discussed topics that were classified as ‘Secret’ at the time.  Eight times in those thousands of email exchanges across four years, Clinton and her team talked about topics designated as ‘Top Secret,’ sometimes cryptically, sometimes obviously.  They didn’t send each other classified documents, but that didn’t matter.  Even though the people involved in the emails all had appropriate clearances and a need to know, anyone who had ever been granted a security clearance should have known that talking about top-secret information on an unclassified system was a breach of rules governing classified materials.  What was she thinking?  Comey had at the front of his mind from the start of the investigation the case of former CIA Director David Petraeus, which had concluded only a few months earlier.  In 2011, Petraeus had given multiple notebooks containing highly sensitive, top-secret information to an author with whom he was having an affair.  This author did not have the appropriate clearance or a legitimate need to know, in contrast with those Hillary corresponded with. Then Petraeus lied to the FBI about what he had done, yet the DOJ charged him only with a misdemeanor as a result of a plea-bargain; in April 2015, he admitted guilt and agreed to a $40,000 fine and probation for two years.  (Comey had felt he should have been charged with a felony for lying to the FBI.  Arguing, and replaying in his mind the Martha Steward, Leonidas Young, and Scooter Libby cases, he argued that if we weren’t going to hold retired generals and CIA directors accountable for blatantly lying during investigations, how could we justify jailing thousands of others for doing the same thing?).  In any event, Hillary’s case came nowhere near the level of abuse that Petraeus’s case had.

Pg. 178:  In mid-June 2016, the Russian government began dumping emails stolen from institutions associated with the Democratic Party.  They were stolen emails intended to harm Clinton and the Democrats.  Then on June 27, on a hot Phoenix airport tarmac, Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch met privately aboard an FBI jet for about twenty minutes.  Comey found it ridiculous to believe this conversation would impact the investigation.  But the fact that Lynch was not running the investigation, had no impact on the cable news punditry. 

Pg. 188:  The FBI was also busy investigating Russian involvement in our election process.  The Russian government was trying to interfere in the election in three ways.  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.  Third, Putin wanted to help Donald Trump win.  Trump had been saying favorable things about the Russian government and Putin had a long-standing appreciation for business leaders who cut deals rather than stand on principle

Pg. 192:  On October 27, 2016, twelve days before the election, Comey was informed by McCabe about the Clinton emails now found on Hillary’s aids husband, Weiner’s laptop.  There were more than 30,000 of them.  By November 6, two days before the election, Comey informed Congress that the view that no prosecution was warranted had not changed after examining Weiner’s laptop.

Pg. 251:  At a scheduled counterterrorism briefing in the Oval Office with Trump on February 14, 2017, Trump insisted that everyone but Comey leave after the meeting so Trump could talk alone with him.  When all had left, Trump stated ‘I want to talk about Mike Flynn.’  Flynn had lied about talking to the Russian Ambassador about sanctions Obama had imposed on Russia, including lying to the Vice President.  Trump began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians but he had to let him go because he 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.’

Pg. 261:  On May 9, 2017, Comey was speaking to recruits to the FBI in Los Angeles when the TV screens flashed news that ‘Comey Fired.’  Trump wanted Comey left without transportation in Los Angles (but it was too late, McCabe had already authorized his return on the plane).  Also, Trump ordered that Comey was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever.  Then on May 12, Trump tweeted a warning to Comey: “James Comey better hope there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.’  Because of the threat, and the fact that Comey had begun keeping a diary of his meetings with Trump, the tapes Trump threatened him with could, in fact, provide corroboration of Trump’s request that Comey drop the Flynn investigation.  As Comey didn’t trust the DOJ to do the right thing and now assign a special prosecutor, Comey met with the press and revealed the President’s directive to drop the Flynn investigation.  (After Trump fired Comey, Trump stated to the Russians that the firing had relieved great pressure on the Russia investigation.)