CHAPTER 14 THE CLOUD
—THOMAS MORE
ON FEBRUARY 8, 2017, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus invited me to the White House to meet with him in his office, a large room with a conference table and fireplace that offered a view of the grand Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This was the same room I had been in thirteen years earlier with Vice President Dick Cheney to hear his view that thousands would die if the Justice Department didn’t bend its view of lawful electronic surveillance. It was the same room I sat in near midnight later that same week in 2004, after the standoff at John Ashcroft’s hospital bed.
I was there now as a follow-up to my dinner with President Trump and because Priebus wanted to understand, and I wanted to explain, the proper relationship between the FBI and the White House. Priebus had never worked in a presidential administration and seemed genuinely interested in getting it right.
By that point, I’d interacted with two other White House chiefs of staff. My most memorable and contentious interaction was the race to the hospital against Andy Card during the Bush administration. As FBI director under President Obama, I had come to know his chief of staff best. Denis McDonough was an extraordinarily decent, thoughtful, and yet tough person. All chiefs of staff differ, as all people do, in their personalities and leadership qualities. But they all share the experience of prolonged sleep deprivation, as they try to manage the effective operation of the White House and bring some order to what could be, at the best of times, a chaotic enterprise. No president in our history, of course, came close to Donald Trump, who brought his own skills and challenges, and a unique brand of chaos.
I did not know Priebus well. He often seemed both confused and irritated, and it was not hard to imagine why. Running the Trump White House would be a difficult job for even an experienced manager, which Priebus wasn’t. Previously chairman of the Republican National Committee and before that a Wisconsin lawyer, Priebus had never served in the federal government. How could someone like that—or anyone, for that matter—manage someone like Donald Trump? I have no idea. But Priebus seemed to be trying.
Our meeting lasted about twenty minutes, was pleasant, and covered a variety of classified topics, as well as how the FBI and the Department of Justice should interact with the White House. As we were winding up, he asked me if I wanted to see the president. Ironically, the request perfectly undercut the entire point of our meeting. I had just finished discussing the importance of the White House working in a disciplined fashion through the Department of Justice if it wished to communicate with the FBI, except about national security emergencies and National Security Council policy discussions—like encryption—in which the FBI was a key participant. The theme of the conversation was that the FBI must be at arm’s length. Priebus said he understood, and then he immediately wanted to bring me even closer.
After my last encounters, another visit with the president was not high on my priority list. So I said no—thanks, but no thanks—adding that I was sure the president was too busy. He asked again. I demurred again.
He then said, “Sit. I’m sure he’d love to see you. Let me see if he’s in the Oval.” He walked down the hall, the short distance to the Oval Office, and returned moments later. With a smile, he said, “He’d love to see you.”
Without a smile, I replied, “Great.”
When the two of us walked into the Oval Office, the president was talking with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who left shortly after we arrived, leaving Priebus and me with the president alone.
Though this was not the first time I’d seen the new president, it was the first time I had seen him in his new office. He didn’t look comfortable. He was sitting, suit jacket on, close against the famous Resolute desk, both forearms on the desk. As a result, he was separated from everyone who spoke to him by a large block of wood.
In dozens of meetings in that space with Presidents Bush and Obama, I cannot recall ever seeing them stationed at their desk. They instead sat in an armchair by the fireplace and held meetings in a more open, casual arrangement. That made sense to me. As hard as it is to get people to relax and open up with a president, the chances are much better in the sitting area, where we can pretend we are friends gathered around a coffee table. There, the president can try to be one of a group, and draw the others out to tell him the truth. But when the president sits on a throne, protected by a large wooden obstacle, as Trump routinely did in my interactions with him, the formality of the Oval Office is magnified and the chances of getting the full truth plummet.
I also noticed President Trump had changed the curtains, which were now a bright gold. I later learned they were Bill Clinton’s curtains, which, considering Trump’s public views of the former president and his candidate wife, seemed an odd twist. (The press reported that President Trump later replaced the Clinton curtains with his own version of gold.)
As the president greeted me, I sat down in a small wood chair, my knees touching his desk. Priebus tried to steer the conversation to the subject of the so-called Russian dossier that we’d already discussed numerous times. I’m not sure why he did that, but for once the president wasn’t interested in discussing that particular topic. Instead, sitting at the desk once used by Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, he launched into one of his rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness monologues. This time the focus was on a television interview he had given to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News several days earlier. The interview had run during the Super Bowl pregame show, which I had skipped. But I saw plenty of commentary about it afterward.
During the interview, O’Reilly had pressed President Trump as to whether he “respected” Russian president Vladimir Putin:
“I do respect him,” Trump said, “but I respect a lot of people. That doesn’t mean I’m going to get along with him.”
“But he’s a killer,” O’Reilly said. “Putin’s a killer.”
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”
Trump’s answer, seeming to equate Putin’s thuggish regime with American democracy, led to a flurry of criticism from all sides. It also played into a narrative that Trump was too close to the Russian government, an odd line for Trump to encourage. I had often wondered why, when given numerous opportunities to condemn the Russian government’s invasions of its neighbors and repression—even murder—of its own citizens, Trump refused to just state the plain facts. Maybe it was a contrarian streak or maybe it was something more complicated that explained his constant equivocation and apologies for Vladimir Putin. Still, it struck me as odd. Perhaps there was some sound geopolitical rationale for not publicly condemning bad behavior of a foreign government in its own internal matters. But, four weeks earlier at Trump Tower, the president had seemed untroubled when the leaders of the intelligence community unanimously briefed him that Russia had intervened to damage our democracy and had tried to tip the scales of our election. Even behind closed doors, he didn’t recoil about Russian behavior. He didn’t wonder what our adversary might do next. We knew that Vladimir Putin had interfered with the U.S. election in an unprecedented fashion, at least in part to help Trump win. Comments like the one to O’Reilly only underscored why Putin wanted him in office.
In his own blustery way, O’Reilly had challenged the president on his apparent affinity for Putin. And again, Trump had doubled down on his unwillingness to criticize the Russian government.
Now, three days later, seemingly stung or at least preoccupied by the criticism, the president was still fuming and justifying himself.
“What am I going to do?” Trump asked no one in particular. “Say I don’t respect the leader of a major country I’m trying to get along with?”
At first, neither Priebus nor I said anything. We couldn’t even if we’d wanted to, because, as was his practice, President Trump left no space for others to talk. O’Reilly had posed a hard question, he told us. “So I gave a good answer,” he said, looking at us, all but insisting that there was no other rational way to see it. “Really, it was a great answer. I gave a really great answer.”
As Trump kept talking, I could see he was convincing himself of this story line and clearly thought he was convincing us, too. Of course, I didn’t think O’Reilly’s question was hard, or Trump’s answer good, but this wasn’t about him seeking feedback.
In fact, by this point, I had dealt with the president enough to have something of a read on what Trump was doing. His assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our dinner, because he never stops talking. As a result, Trump pulls all those present into a silent circle of assent. With him talking a mile a minute, with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, I could see how easily everyone in the room could become a coconspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. But as Martin Luther once said, “You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.”
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.”
At that remark, Trump stopped talking altogether. In that brightly lit room, with its shiny gold curtains, a shadow seemed to cross his face. I could see something change in his eyes. A hardness, or darkness. In a blink, the eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. He looked like someone who wasn’t used to being challenged or corrected by those around him. He was the one who was supposed to be in complete control. With a small comment, I had just poured a cold dose of criticism and reality on his shameful moral equivalence between Putin’s thugs and the men and women of our government. And just as quickly as the glower crossed his face, it was gone. It was as if I had not spoken, and had never been born. The meeting was done.
The president thanked me for coming in. Priebus, who had said nothing throughout this exchange, escorted me from the room, and I walked off without further conversation.
I went back to the FBI headquarters and told members of my staff that I had probably ended any personal relationship with the president with that move. I had resisted his request for a pledge of loyalty two weeks earlier, and now I had just cut through the cocoon to criticize the man behind the desk. We weren’t going to have a friendly rapport, as I did with Presidents Bush and Obama. That was not necessarily a bad thing. FBI directors shouldn’t be too close to a sitting president or his administration—which, of course, was the original reason I was at the White House that day.
Still, the encounter left me shaken. I had never seen anything like it in the Oval Office. As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. 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.
* * *
Less than a week later, I was back at the scene, my knees again touching the Resolute desk.
On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of President Trump. He again held forth from behind the desk, and a group of us sat in a semicircle of about six chairs facing him on the other side. I was seated in that semicircle with Vice President Pence, the deputy director of the CIA, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the secretary of Homeland Security, and my new boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The new attorney general had been in office less than a week at that point. My first impressions of him were that he was eerily similar to Alberto Gonzales—both overwhelmed and overmatched by the job—but Sessions lacked the kindness Gonzales radiated.
The president seemed oddly uninterested and distracted during the classified briefing. I had some concerning and important things to say about the current terrorism threat inside the United States, but they drew no reaction. At the end of the low-energy session, he signaled that the briefing was over. “Thanks, everybody,” he said in a loud voice. Then, pointing at me, he added, “I just want to talk to Jim. Thanks, everybody.”
Here we go again.
I didn’t know what he wanted to talk about, but this request was so unusual that I suspected another memo lay in my immediate future. As such, I knew I needed to try to remember every word he spoke, exactly as he said them.
Having no choice in the matter, I stayed in my chair, as the participants started to leave the Oval Office. The attorney general, however, lingered by my chair. As my boss at the Justice Department, he undoubtedly and rightly thought he should be present for this conversation. “Thanks, Jeff,” the president said in a dismissive manner, “but I want to talk to Jim.”
Then it was Jared Kushner’s turn. Kushner had been sitting behind me, with other White House aides, on the couches and chairs by the coffee table. He likely knew his father-in-law better than anyone else in the room and seemed to be attempting a similar sort of intervention. By engaging me in a conversation while the others were clearing out—Jared talked about the Clinton email investigation and how hard it must have been—perhaps he thought Trump would forget that he’d asked everyone out, including him. No dice.
“Okay, Jared, thank you,” Trump said. His son-in-law seemed as reluctant as Sessions, but he too made his exit.
When the door by the grandfather clock closed and we were alone, the president set his eyes on me.
“I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” he said. Flynn, his national security adviser, had been forced to resign the previous day. I didn’t know Flynn well, but had testified alongside him in 2014 when he served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I found him likable.
Flynn, who was a retired U.S. Army general, had spoken to the Russian ambassador to the United States multiple times during December 2016, to seek the Russians’ help in derailing a United Nations resolution—which the Obama administration was not going to veto—condemning Israel for the expansion of its settlements in occupied territory, and also to urge the Russians not to escalate their response to Obama administration sanctions imposed as a result of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The conversations about sanctions had become the subject of intense public interest after they were reported in the media in early January and Vice President–Elect Pence went on television to deny Flynn had talked about sanctions with the Russians. Pence said he knew this because he had talked to Flynn. On January 24, as part of our continuing investigation of Russian influence efforts, I dispatched two agents to the White House to interview Flynn about his conversations with the Russians. He lied to the agents, denying that he had discussed the very topics he had talked about in detail with the Russian ambassador.
The president began by saying General 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 added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify.
The president then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information—a concern I shared. Like all presidents before him, he was frustrated that people with access to classified information were out there talking to reporters about it. I explained that this was a long-standing problem that had plagued his predecessors and that the cases were hard to make because they required us to sometimes have investigative contact with members of the media (for example, by subpoenaing phone records). But I also told him that if we could make a case—if we could nail a leaker of classified information to the wall—it would serve as an important deterrence signal. Although I had made no reference or suggestion about going after members of the media, the president said something about how we once put reporters in jail and that made them talk. This was a reference to the Scooter Libby investigation, when New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent nearly three months in jail in 2005 for contempt of court in refusing to comply with a court order for information about her conversations with Libby. He then urged me to talk to Attorney General Sessions about ways to be more aggressive in making cases against leakers of classified information. I told him I would convey that message.
After the president had spoken for a few minutes about leaks, Reince Priebus leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock. I could see a group of people, including the vice president, waiting behind him. The president waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed.
The president then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that General Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but 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.”
At the time, I had understood the president to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the president to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency. Imagine the reaction if a President Hillary Clinton had asked to speak to the FBI director alone and urged him to back off the investigation of her national security advisor.
I did not interrupt the president to protest that what he was asking was inappropriate, as I probably should have. But if he didn’t know what he was doing was inappropriate, why had he just ejected everyone, including my boss and the vice president, from the room so he could speak with me alone?
Instead, I only agreed that “he is a good guy,” or seemed to be from what I knew of him. I did not say I would “let this go.”
The president showed no reaction to my reply and returned briefly to the problem of leaks. The conversation ended and I got up and left through the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Priebus, the vice president, and the new secretary of health and human services, Tom Price. No one spoke to me.
In the car, I emailed my staff that the counterterrorism briefing they had spent so much time preparing me for had gone well, but “now I have to write another memo.” What I meant was that I had another conversation with the president that I needed to document. I prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership, including Deputy Director McCabe; my chief of staff, Jim Rybicki; and the FBI’s general counsel, Jim Baker. In a little over a month, I had now written multiple memos about encounters with Donald Trump. I knew I would need to remember these conversations both because of their content and because I knew I was dealing with a chief executive who might well lie about them. To protect the FBI, and myself, I needed a contemporaneous record.
The other FBI leaders agreed that it was important not to infect the investigative team looking at Flynn—and more broadly at alleged Russian coordination with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election—with the president’s request, which we did not intend to follow. We also concluded that, given that it was a one-on-one conversation, there was no way to corroborate my account. We decided it made little sense to report it to Attorney General Sessions, who we expected would likely recuse himself from involvement in Russia-related investigations. (He did so two weeks later.) The deputy attorney general’s role was then filled in an acting capacity by a United States Attorney who would not be staying in the job. We resolved to figure out down the road what to do with the president’s request and its implications as our investigation progressed.
After the February 14 meeting with the president, I directed Jim Rybicki to arrange for me to speak to the attorney general at the completion of our regular Wednesday threat briefing the next morning. At the close of the regular meeting, everyone left the room, except the attorney general, me, and our chiefs of staff. Sessions was sitting across the table from me in the secure conference room at the Department of Justice. He was in the same place, and likely the same chair, where Loretta Lynch had been sitting when she told me to call the Clinton email investigation “a matter.”
When the room was clear, I did what I had promised the president and passed along his concerns about leaks and his expectation that we would be aggressive in pursuing them. Under the optimistic assumption that the attorney general had any control over President Trump, I then took the opportunity to implore him to prevent any future one-on-one communications between the president and me. “That can’t happen,” I said. “You are my boss. You can’t be kicked out of the room so he can talk to me alone. You have to be between me and the president.” He didn’t ask me whether anything happened that troubled me, and I didn’t say, for reasons discussed above. Instead, in a move that would become familiar to me, Sessions cast his eyes down at the table, and they darted quickly back and forth, side to side. To my memory, he said nothing. After a brief moment of eye darting, he put both hands on the table and stood, thanking me for coming. I read in his posture and face a message that he would not be able to help me. Rybicki and I left. I was so thrown by the silent eye darting that I had Rybicki follow up with a call to Sessions’s chief of staff to make sure he understood my concern and the importance of the attorney general’s shielding me from the president. His chief of staff said they got it.
But they didn’t. Or couldn’t.
* * *
I would struggle with President Trump for three more months. On March 1, I was about to get on a helicopter to fly to an opioid summit in Richmond when my assistant, Althea James, called me on my cell phone to say the president wanted to speak with me. I had no idea what the subject was, but assumed it must be important, so I waited in the FBI Suburban on the helipad. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s leader, my old friend Chuck Rosenberg, waited for me on the helicopter.
After several minutes, my cell phone rang and a White House operator announced the president. He came on the line to say he was calling “just to see how you’re doing.” I replied that I was doing fine and had a lot going on. To make conversation, I told him the attorney general seemed to have hit the ground running with a good speech about violent crime. He replied, “That’s his thing.” The awkward conversation, which lasted less than a minute, struck me as yet another effort to bring me close, to ensure I was an amica nostra, a friend of ours. Why else would the president of the United States, who presumably had a million things to do, call the FBI director just to “see how you’re doing”? I got out of the car and joined the DEA leader, apologizing that the delay was because the president just wanted to say “wassup.”
On March 30, Trump called me at the FBI to describe the Russia investigation as “a cloud” that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. For about the fourth time, he argued that the “golden showers thing” wasn’t true, asking yet again, “Can you imagine me, hookers?” In an apparent play for my sympathy, he added that he has a beautiful wife and the whole thing has been very painful to her.
He asked what we could do to “lift the cloud.” I responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could, and that there would be great benefit, if we didn’t find anything, to our having done the work well. He agreed, but then reemphasized the problems this was causing him.
Then the president asked why there had been a congressional hearing about Russia the previous week—at which I had, as the Department of Justice directed, confirmed the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. I explained the demands from the leadership of both parties in Congress for more information, and that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Iowa senator Charles Grassley, had even held up the confirmation of the deputy attorney general until we briefed him in detail on the investigation. I also explained that we had briefed the leadership of Congress on exactly which individuals we were investigating and that we had told those congressional leaders that we were not personally investigating President Trump. He repeatedly told me, “We need to get that fact out.” I did not tell the president, mostly because I knew he wouldn’t want to hear it, that the FBI and the Department of Justice had been reluctant to make public statements that we did not have an open case on President Trump for a number of reasons, most important that it would create a duty to correct that statement should that status change.
The president went on to say that if there were some “satellite” associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out. He repeated that he hadn’t done anything wrong and he hoped I would find a way to get it out that we weren’t investigating him.
In an abrupt shift, he turned the conversation to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. He said he hadn’t brought up “the McCabe thing” because I had said McCabe was honorable, although Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, was close to the Clintons and had given him (I think he meant McCabe’s wife) campaign money. I knew what he was referring to. McCabe’s wife, Jill, a physician in northern Virginia, had run for the Virginia state legislature and lost in 2015, when McCabe was in charge of the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office. She had been recruited to run by Governor McAuliffe, and her campaign was funded in large part by money from political action committees the governor controlled. Trump had repeatedly accused the FBI during the presidential campaign of going soft on Hillary Clinton because Andy’s wife was connected to the Virginia governor, an old friend of the Clintons. As a presidential candidate, Trump also had claimed, incorrectly, that Hillary Clinton herself had given money to McCabe’s wife.
In any event, the assertion was nonsense, for a bunch of reasons—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. And the FBI spent years investigating various Clinton-related cases, including during the Bill Clinton presidency, when FBI Director Louis Freeh, a former special agent, famously surrendered his White House pass because he considered Clinton a criminal investigative subject. But Trump had twice asked me early in his tenure whether “McCabe has a problem with me, because I was pretty tough on his wife.” I had answered that Andy was a true professional and put all that stuff to the side.
I didn’t understand why the president was bringing this up on the phone now—it might well have been his attempt at trading favors, or a threat that he would start attacking the deputy director. I repeated that McCabe was an honorable person, not motivated by politics.
President Trump finished by stressing “the cloud” that was interfering with his ability to make deals for the country and said he hoped I could find a way to get out that he wasn’t being investigated. I told him I would see what we could do, and that we would do our investigative work well and as quickly as we could.
Immediately after that conversation, I called Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente (because Sessions had recused himself on Russia-related matters and there was no confirmed deputy attorney general) to report the president’s request to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation, and said I would await his guidance. I did not hear back from him before Trump called me again two weeks later.
* * *
On the morning of April 11, the president called to ask what I had done about his request that I “get out” that he is not personally under investigation. In contrast to most of our other interactions, there were no compliments thrown, no cheery check-ins just to see what I was up to. He seemed irritated with me.
I replied that I had passed his request to the acting deputy attorney general, but I had not heard back. He replied that “the cloud” was getting in the way of his ability to do his job. He said that perhaps he would have his people reach out to the acting deputy attorney general. I said that was the way his request should be handled. The White House counsel should contact the leadership of DOJ to make the request, which was the traditional channel.
He said he would do that. Then he added, “Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal. We had that thing, you know.”
I did not reply or ask him what he meant by “that thing,” but it seemed an attempt to invoke a mutual pledge of loyalty, one he struggled to deliver as he recalled I had actually resisted pledging loyalty. At “the thing” we had, a private dinner in the Green Room, he was promised only “honest loyalty.” Regardless, I responded to his odd effort to invoke loyalty by saying only that the way to handle it was to have the White House counsel call the acting deputy attorney general. He said that was what he would do, and the call ended.
That was the last time I spoke with President Trump. We reported the call to the acting deputy attorney general. He had apparently done nothing since March 30, replying, “Oh, God, I was hoping that would just go away.”
It wouldn’t go away.
* * *
Fittingly, it all finally ended in a blizzard of awful behavior. I was in Los Angeles on May 9, 2017, to attend a Diversity Agent Recruiting event. This was an effort we had previously mounted in Washington and Houston, where we invited talented young lawyers, engineers, and business school graduates of color to come listen to why they should take cuts in pay and become FBI special agents. I loved these events—which were in keeping with our quest to attract more minority agents—and the two so far had been hugely successful. Diversifying the Bureau was the key to our sustained effectiveness. As noted earlier, the major obstacle was that so many young people, especially high-potential black and Latino men and women, thought of the FBI as “The Man.” Who would want to work for “The Man”? I loved these events because it gave me and other FBI leaders the chance to show these talented people a bit more about what “The Man,” and the woman, of the FBI were really like.
These young people were hungry to make a difference, and we could show them what lives of service, sacrifice, and making an extraordinary difference for good looked like. Almost nobody leaves the FBI once they taste the life of a special agent. My mission was to dare these great young people to try to join that life. The yield from events in Washington and Houston had been surprisingly high. I was coming to L.A. to speak to more than five hundred potential new agents. I knew that audience held many future special agents. I couldn’t wait to connect with them.
Although the recruiting event was in the evening, I went early enough to have time to visit the FBI’s Los Angeles field office. I was committed to walking around FBI offices everywhere, floor by floor and cubicle by cubicle, meeting every employee and shaking every hand. It was worth the effort because I could tell it meant a lot to our people to have the director thank them personally. In a big organization like the FBI, with offices around the country and the world, it helps to remind people that you appreciate the hard work they do. That you care about them, not just professionally, but about them—and their families. Every time I traveled, I carved out hours to visit the field offices to meet the amazing people that staffed them.
I met dozens of L.A. employees standing at their desks. The L.A. office leadership had also done something thoughtful and assembled those who didn’t have desks—the cleaning staff and those working in the communications room. They were all sitting at tables in a large command center room. I began addressing them at about 2 P.M. Los Angeles time, 5 P.M. in Washington. I explained that we had rewritten the FBI’s mission statement in 2015 to make it shorter and to better express the importance of our responsibility. Our newly defined mission was to “protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” I said I wanted it shorter so everyone would know it, connect to it, and share it with neighbors and especially young people. I expected everyone to realize …
And then I stopped in midsentence.
On the TV screens along the back wall I could see COMEY RESIGNS in large letters. The screens were behind my audience, but they noticed my distraction and started turning in their seats. I laughed and said, “That’s pretty funny. Somebody put a lot of work into that one.” I continued my thought. “There are no support employees in the FBI. I expect…”
The message on the screens now changed. Across three screens, displaying three different news stations, I now saw the same words: COMEY FIRED. I wasn’t laughing any longer. There was a buzz in the room. I told the audience, “Look, I’m going to go figure out what’s happening, but whether that’s true or not, my message won’t change, so let me finish it and then shake your hands.” I said, “Every one of you is personally responsible for protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution of the United States. We all have different roles, but the same mission. Thank you for doing it well.” I then moved among the employees, shaking every hand, and walked to a private office to find out what was happening.
The FBI director travels with a communications team so he can be reached by the Justice Department or White House in seconds, any time of day or night. But nobody called. Not the attorney general. Not the deputy attorney general. Nobody. I actually had seen the attorney general the day before. Days earlier, I had met alone with the newly confirmed deputy attorney general at his request so he could ask my advice on how to do his job—which I held from 2003 to 2005. In late October, shortly before the election, the now-DAG had been serving as the United States Attorney in Baltimore, and he invited me to speak to his entire staff about leadership and why I made the decisions I did in July about the Clinton email case. He praised me then as an inspirational leader. Now, he not only didn’t call me, he had authored a memo to justify my firing, describing my conduct during 2016 as awful and unacceptable. That made absolutely no sense to me in light of our recent contacts.
All I knew was what was being reported in the media. After much scrambling, we learned that a White House employee was down on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, trying to deliver a letter to me from the president. I took a call from my wife, who said she and the kids had seen the news. I replied that I didn’t know whether it was true and we were trying to find out what was going on. Pat Fitzgerald called and I told him the same thing.
I took an emotional call from General John Kelly, then the secretary of Homeland Security. He said he was sick about my firing and that he intended to quit in protest. He said he didn’t want to work for dishonorable people who would treat someone like me in such a manner. I urged Kelly not to do that, arguing that the country needed principled people around this president. Especially this president.
My amazing assistant, Althea James, got the letter from the White House guy at the front door down on Pennsylvania Avenue. She scanned it and emailed it to me. I was fired, effective immediately, by the president who had repeatedly praised me and asked me to stay, based on a recommendation from the deputy attorney general, who had praised me as a great leader, a recommendation accepted by the attorney general, who was both recused from all Russia-related matters and who, according to President Trump at our dinner, thought I was great. The reasons for that firing were lies, but the letter was real. I felt sick to my stomach and slightly dazed.
I stepped out of the office, and a large group of L.A. FBI employees had gathered. Many were tearful. I spoke to them briefly, telling them that the FBI’s values were bigger and stronger than any one of us. It broke my heart to leave them, I said, but they should know it was their quality as people—honest, competent, and independent—that made this so painful. I hated to leave them. I went to the office of the Los Angeles FBI leader, Deirdre Fike. I had chosen her for that job and trusted her judgment. My first instinct, and hers, was that I should attend the diversity event anyway, as a private citizen. This was something I cared deeply about, and I could still urge these talented men and women to join this life, even if I would no longer be part of it. Eventually, though, we decided I would be a distraction because a media circus would crash the event. I could do more harm than good. I decided to go home.
Which raised the question: How would I get home? I left that decision to the man who minutes earlier had become the acting director of the FBI, my deputy, Andrew McCabe. The news had been just as big a surprise to him as it had been to me. Now he was in command. He and his team had to figure out what was lawful and appropriate. In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport.
News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel.
As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news.
President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California.
McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely.
The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close.
Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since.
Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did,” Andy replied.
The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.
* * *
I sat by myself on the flight home, trying to gather my thoughts and committing what would have been a rules violation if I were still an FBI employee. I reached into my suitcase and retrieved a bottle of pinot noir I was bringing home from California. I drank red wine from a paper coffee cup and stared out the window at the lights of the country I love so much. As we approached Washington, I asked the pilots if I could sit up front with them to experience the landing at Reagan Airport in a way I never had, despite hundreds of flights on FBI planes. I sat in the jump seat just behind them, headphones on, and watched two talented special agent–pilots land the plane, for the last time with me as a passenger. They had taken me all over the country and the world and now squeezed my hand an extra beat as we said good-bye, with tears in our eyes.
As I flew home from California that night, sipping red wine, I was left with my thoughts about what might come next. I wasn’t planning to do anything except take some time to figure out what to do with my life. In the days that followed, on their own initiative, friends shared with the media things I had told them about my struggle to establish appropriate boundaries between the FBI and the Trump White House and my effort to resist pledging loyalty to President Trump at our dinner, but there were dark stories about my experience with the president that were not yet in the media.
It may sound strange, but throughout my five months working under Donald Trump, I wanted him to succeed as president. That’s not a political bias. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, I would have wanted her to succeed as president. I think that’s what it means to love your country. We need our presidents to succeed. My encounters with President Trump left me sad, not angry. I 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.
On Friday, May 12, President Trump tweeted a warning to me and his thirty-nine million followers: “James Comey better hope there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.” This struck me as bizarre. Was he threatening me? I had no plans to talk to the press or leak classified information. All I wanted was to get Donald Trump out of my head, so I didn’t spend time thinking about what it meant. Instead, I stayed inside my house, sleeping, exercising, and avoiding the media crowd gathered at the end of my driveway.
On Tuesday, May 16, Patrice and I were planning to sneak past the press and get out of town for a few days. I woke up at about 2:00 A.M. that morning, jolted awake by a thought: the president’s tweet changes my perspective on how to address our February 14, 2017, meeting, when he expressed his “hope” that I would drop an investigation of his former national security adviser, Mike Flynn. Though I had written an unclassified memo about the conversation, the FBI leadership and I had gotten stuck there because it would be my word against the president’s. We hadn’t given up on pursuing it, but instead had decided to hold it—and keep it away from the investigative team so they wouldn’t be influenced by the president. We could think about it more once the Department of Justice decided how they would supervise the investigations related to the Trump administration and Russia after the attorney general was recused. But this tweet about tapes changed everything, I thought, lying there in the dark. If there are tapes of my conversations with President Trump, there will be corroboration of the fact that he said he wanted me to drop the Flynn investigation. It will no longer be my word against his. If there is a tape, the president of the United States will be heard in the Oval Office telling me, “I hope you can let it go.”
I lay in bed thinking through this delayed revelation. I could leave it alone, and hope the FBI leadership team saw what I saw in Trump’s tweet about tapes and that they would start pushing the Department of Justice to go get the tapes. Maybe the FBI would even urge Justice to appoint an independent prosecutor to pursue this. Maybe I could trust that the system would work. But I had trusted the system years earlier on the question of torture. Then, I had trusted the attorney general to carry our department’s concerns about torture policy to the White House, to a meeting I was excluded from, but nothing happened. No, I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. This time I could and would do something because, ironically, thanks to Donald Trump, I was a private citizen now.
I trusted the FBI, but I didn’t trust the Department of Justice leadership under the current attorney general and deputy attorney general to do the right thing. Something was needed that might force them to do the right thing. Now that I was a private citizen, I could do something. I decided I would prompt a media story by revealing the president’s February 14 direction that I drop the Flynn investigation. That might force the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor, who could then go get the tapes that Trump had tweeted about. And, although I was banned from FBI property, I had a copy of my unclassified memo about his request stored securely at home.
Tuesday morning, after dawn, I contacted my good friend Dan Richman, a former prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School. Dan had been giving me legal advice since my firing. I told him I was going to send him one unclassified memo and I wanted him to share the substance of the memo—but not the memo itself—with a reporter. If I do it myself, I thought, it will create a media frenzy—at my driveway, no less—and I will be hard-pressed to refuse follow-up comments. I would, of course, tell the truth if asked whether I played a part in it. I did. I had to. To be clear, this was not a “leak” of classified information no matter how many times politicians, political pundits, or the president call it that. A private citizen may legally share unclassified details of a conversation with the president with the press, or include that information in a book. I believe in the power of the press and know Thomas Jefferson was right when he wrote: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
I don’t know whether the media storm that followed my disclosure of the February 14 “let it go” conversation prompted the Department of Justice leadership to appoint a special counsel. The FBI may already have been pushing for the appointment of a special counsel after seeing the Trump tweet about tapes. I just know that the Department of Justice did so shortly thereafter, giving Robert Mueller the authority to investigate any coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign and any related matters.
I also don’t know whether the special counsel will find criminal wrongdoing by the president or others who have not been charged as of this writing. One of the pivotal questions I presume that Bob Mueller’s team is investigating is whether or not in urging me to back the FBI off our investigation of his national security advisor and in firing me, President Trump was attempting to obstruct justice, which is a federal crime. It’s certainly possible. There is at least circumstantial evidence in that regard, and there may be more that the Mueller team will assemble. I’ve prosecuted and overseen many cases involving obstruction of justice, but in this case, I am not the prosecutor. I am a witness. I have one perspective on the behavior I saw, which while disturbing and violating basic norms of ethical leadership, may fall short of being illegal. Central to the question of obstruction, for example, is a showing of President Trump’s intent. Is there sufficient proof that he intended to take those actions and others to derail a criminal investigation, with corrupt intent? Because I don’t know all the evidence, I can’t answer that question with any certainty. I do know that, as of this writing, Special Counsel Mueller and his team are hard at work and the American people can have confidence that, unless their investigation is blocked in some fashion, they will get to the truth, whatever that is.
* * *
On June 8, 2017, I testified publicly before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which wanted to hear about my interactions with President Trump. For whatever reason, the president had only increased people’s interest in my perspectives. I decided to write an account of some of my dealings with him and submit it in advance to the committee, so that I wouldn’t need to speak for a long time at the start of my testimony, and to give the senators a chance to digest what I wrote and ask follow-up questions.
I wanted to use my brief opening statement to accomplish one thing—to say good-bye to the people of the FBI, something President Trump did not have the grace or charity of spirit to allow me to do. It also allowed me to deny, on their behalf and mine, the lies the administration had told about the FBI being in disarray. I knew they would be watching and I could speak directly to them.
I practiced what I wanted to say in front of Patrice and one of our daughters. They were shocked that I intended to speak without notes, but I told them it had to come from the heart and that, if I brought a text, I would end up staring at it. As nerve-racking as it was to speak without notes in front of millions of people, that was the way it would mean the most to the people of the FBI. Patrice was also concerned that in my nervousness, I would smile like a fool or frown as if somebody had died. I had to find a place between those two.
I questioned my decision to go without notes as I stood in a conference room waiting to walk into the Senate hearing room. What if I freeze? What if I get all tangled up in my words? I don’t normally get nervous in public, but this was nuts. But it was too late. I walked with the leaders of the committee down the long private hall behind the dais, turned left, and stepped into something surreal. I have seen lots of cameras in my day and heard my share of shutter clicks. Nothing compared to this scene.
As I sat at the witness table in the eye of the storm, I kept hearing Patrice’s voice in my head: “Think about the people of the FBI; that will bring light to your eyes.” And so I did. I stumbled a bit, and nearly lost control of my emotions at the end when speaking about the people of the FBI, but I spoke from the heart:
When I was appointed FBI Director in 2013, I understood that I served at the pleasure of the President. Even though I was appointed to a 10-year term, which Congress created in order to underscore the importance of the FBI being outside of politics and independent, I understood that I could be fired by a President for any reason or for no reason at all.
And on May the 9th, when I learned that I had been fired, for that reason I immediately came home as a private citizen. But then the explanations, the shifting explanations, confused me and increasingly concerned me. They confused me because the President and I had had multiple conversations about my job, both before and after he took office, and he had repeatedly told me I was doing a great job and he hoped I would stay. And I had repeatedly assured him that I did intend to stay and serve out the remaining six years of my term.
He told me repeatedly that he had talked to lots of people about me, including our current attorney general, and had learned that I was doing a great job and that I was extremely well liked by the FBI workforce.
So it confused me when I saw on television the President saying that he actually fired me because of the Russia investigation and learned, again from the media, that he was telling privately other parties that my firing had relieved great pressure on the Russia investigation.
I was also confused by the initial explanation that was offered publicly, that I was fired because of the decisions I had made during the election year. That didn’t make sense to me for a whole bunch of reasons, including the time and all the water that had gone under the bridge since those hard decisions that had to be made. That didn’t make any sense to me.
And although the law required no reason at all to fire an FBI Director, the administration then chose to defame me and, more importantly, the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader.
Those were lies, plain and simple, and I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them and I’m so sorry that the American people were told them. I worked every day at the FBI to help make that great organization better. And I say “help” because I did nothing alone at the FBI. There are no indispensable people at the FBI. The organization’s great strength is that its values and abilities run deep and wide. The FBI will be fine without me. The FBI’s mission will be relentlessly pursued by its people, and that mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
I will deeply miss being part of that mission, but this organization and its mission will go on long beyond me and long beyond any particular administration.
I have a message before I close for my former colleagues at the FBI. But first I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is and always will be independent.
And now, to my former colleagues, if I may. I am so sorry that I didn’t get the chance to say good-bye to you properly. It was the honor of my life to serve beside you, to be part of the FBI family. And I will miss it for the rest of my life. Thank you for standing watch. Thank you for doing so much good for this country. Do that good as long as ever you can.
And, Senators, I look forward to your questions.
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