A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

  He was an associate pastor and youth minister at the historic Fourth Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, when I was the supervising federal prosecutor in that city in the late 1990s. The senior pastor at his church was the charismatic mayor of Richmond, Leonidas B. Young. Unfortunately, Mayor Young was a bit too charismatic for his own good. Although married with children, he was simultaneously carrying on an ambitious number of affairs with other women. To maintain those relationships in the face of some sexual performance issues, Young had undergone an expensive mechanical penile implant, which then catastrophically failed, leading to additional procedures and costs. With his medical bills and purchases of gifts, trips, and hotels for multiple paramours, Young was struggling financially. Sadly, he decided to use his city government position to raise cash, and turned to his associate pastor to help him do it.

  At the time, Richmond was considering privatizing city cemeteries. Executives of one company interested in bidding on the cemeteries met with Young. The mayor told them their chances of winning the bid would be materially enhanced if they hired certain people, such as his junior minister at Fourth Baptist, as “consultants.” The company then wrote checks for thousands of dollars to that junior minister, among others. Bank records showed the minister cashed the checks and then funneled the money to the mayor.

  My fellow prosecutor Bob Trono and I met with the young minister. There was something about him that made me want to help him. I looked him directly in the eye and said I believed he was a good person, that he had done something as a favor to his mentor and senior pastor at his church, Mayor Leonidas Young. From what we could tell, the young minister hadn’t kept any of the money he had helped Mayor Young embezzle. Admit this, I told him, and you will be okay. Lie, and I will have to prosecute you for it. Mayor Young will turn on you, someday, I told him. He began to sweat, but he insisted the cemetery company had hired him for his expertise and that he had not given any money to Young.

  I felt deep sadness as the meeting ended, because I could see the future and what it held for a young pastor from Richmond who had a promising career ahead of him. Leonidas Young was indicted, pled guilty to racketeering, and was sentenced to federal prison. As part of an effort to reduce the length of that sentence, he named the associate pastor as one of his money launderers. The young minister was indicted and convicted of lying during the investigation. At the trial, prosecuted by Bob Trono, Leonidas Young testified against him. The young pastor was sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison for lying. I have left his name out of my book because I hope he has made a good and happy life after prison.

  As I stared out of my Manhattan office window and remembered that young minister, I was suddenly ashamed of myself. He was not famous. I was probably the only person outside Richmond who even knew his name. And here I was, the United States Attorney in Manhattan, hesitating to prosecute Martha Stewart because it would bring criticism. I was actually considering letting her go because she was rich and famous. What a miscarriage of justice. What a coward I was.

  I asked Dave Kelley to find out how many people had been indicted in the United States the previous year for lying to federal investigators. How many “regular people” lied and then paid dearly for it? The answer was two thousand. Kelley told me I needed to stop wringing my hands; this was the right thing to do and I should get on with it. He was right. I told my staff to indict Martha Stewart and decided Karen Seymour should lead the case at trial.

  Charging Martha Stewart was my first experience with getting a lot of hate and heat for a decision that had been carefully and thoughtfully made. People just could not, for the life of them, understand how I could make a mountain out of a molehill in an effort to ruin Martha Stewart. I was obviously out of control, making decisions that no reasonable person could support. The onslaught was bracing, but I was comfortable we had made the right decision, and in the right way. It would also prove to be good practice for a future I couldn’t have imagined back then. Stewart was convicted and sentenced to five months at the federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia.

  The Stewart experience reminded me that the justice system is an honor system. 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.

  There was once a time when most people worried about going to hell if they violated an oath taken in the name of God. That divine deterrence has slipped away from our modern cultures. In its place, people must fear going to jail. They must fear their lives being turned upside down. They must fear their pictures splashed on newspapers and websites. People must fear having their name forever associated with a criminal act if we are to have a nation with the rule of law. Martha Stewart lied, blatantly, in the justice system. To protect the institution of justice, and reinforce a culture of truth-telling, she had to be prosecuted. 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 would continue to commit the same foolish act.

  * * *

  As United States Attorney in Manhattan, I reported to the deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice in Washington. The deputy attorney general—often called the DAG—was the number-two official, the chief operating officer of the department. Everyone in the organization, with the exception of the attorney general’s small personal staff, reported to the DAG, who reported to the attorney general. It was a crazy organizational chart, one you could only find in the government. But I figured it likely made for an interesting job.

  In the summer of 2003, Larry Thompson, who was then serving in the post, came to see me in Manhattan. He was burned out and told me he would be leaving in the fall. He intended to recommend to the George W. Bush White House that I replace him as deputy attorney general. Was I interested?

  The answer was yes. I loved being United States Attorney, but New York, as before, was not a great situation for me or my family. For cost-of-living reasons, we lived fifty miles north of my office. The rough commute made it very hard for me to see Patrice and the kids as much as I would have liked. It meant plenty of missed recitals, games, and parent-teacher conferences. I once left my office at 4 P.M. for a 6 P.M. Little League game, and because of the hellish commute missed nearly the entire game. That kind of thing made me ache. It was not who I wanted to be. If we could move the kids to Washington, I knew I would have a job that would keep me plenty busy, but I also knew I could avoid three or four hours commuting every day. Of course, there was danger in moving closer to the political heart of the country. One New York journalist captured the views of many of my colleagues when he wrote a piece titled “Mr. Comey Goes to Washington,” saying there was no doubt I would retain my sense of humor when I moved to Washington; the harder question was whether I would lose my soul. I confess I shared the concern, but the move would be best for my family. And how bad could it be?

  So I traveled to Washington to meet with President George W. Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales. We met in his office on the second floor of the West Wing. This wasn’t my first visit to the White House counsel’s suite of offices. In 1995, I had worked briefly for the Senate committee investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investments in an Arkansas development called Whitewater and a variety of related issues. One of those issues involved the suicide of President Clinton’s deputy White House counsel Vince Foster and the subsequent handling of documents left in his office. During my five months on the committee legal staff, I was assigned to visit the second floor of the West Wing to examine the suite of offices in which Foster had worked. One of the questions the committee had was whether First Lady Hillary Clinton or anyone acting on her behalf went to Foster’s office after his death and removed documents. I left the investigation long before any conclusions were reached, but I can recall pacing off the distance between Hillary Clinto
n’s office on the second floor and the White House counsel’s suite.

  I had also been to the West Wing in the spring of 2001. As an Assistant United States Attorney in Richmond, I was handling a terrorism case and expected the indictment in the case to accuse Iran of funding and directing the devastating 1996 attack on a United States Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia that killed nineteen Americans and wounded hundreds. Such an accusation would have foreign policy implications, and the new Bush administration gathered its senior national security team to hear Attorney General John Ashcroft’s explanation as to why the accusation against Iran was well founded. Ashcroft’s staff decided I would accompany him to the White House but sit outside the Situation Room meeting, just in case he needed me as a resource for details. I was relaxed and enjoying my first visit to the Situation Room, because I had no speaking role and wasn’t even in the meeting. I could just look around and soak it in. The soaking didn’t last long. Soon I was underwater.

  Minutes after the door to the secure meeting room closed, it opened again and there stood the secretary of state, Colin Powell.

  “Who’s the prosecutor? You the prosecutor?” he barked, fixing his gaze on me.

  “Yes, sir,” I stammered.

  “Get in here,” he ordered. Apparently, the start of the meeting had not gone well.

  General Powell ushered me into the small conference room and directed me to a seat at the table, directly across from him and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, sat at the head of the table. I sat between the slightly flushed-looking attorney general and FBI Director Louis Freeh. For the next twenty minutes, the two strong-willed cabinet secretaries grilled me about my case and my evidence as I sweated through my suit. When they ran out of questions, they asked me to leave. I walked out, numb, while the meeting continued. Several weeks later, I got the approval to include the accusation that Iran was behind the Khobar Towers attack.

  Now here I was, back again. The main floor of the West Wing is home to grand, high-ceilinged offices, including, of course, the Oval Office. It always seemed to me that the architects got the space for those high ceilings by taking it from the levels above and below, especially the basement. Down there, where I would spend so much of my later career in national security meetings, the doorframes were about six feet, seven inches high. To navigate, I would discreetly bob my head down as if nodding to an unseen companion as I walked. I had no idea how finely calibrated my ducking was until I got new soles and heels on a pair of dress shoes during the George W. Bush administration. Apparently, this refurbished footwear made me about a half-inch taller than usual. Rushing so as not to be late to a Situation Room meeting with the president, I did the usual bob and smacked my head so hard that I rocked backward, stunned. A Secret Service agent asked me if I was okay. I said yes, and continued walking, stars in my eyes. As I sat at the table with the president and his national security team, I began to feel liquid on my scalp and realized I was bleeding. So I did the obvious thing: I kept tilting my head in different directions to keep the running blood inside my hairline. Heaven only knows what President Bush thought was wrong with me, but he never saw my blood.

  The top floor, where Gonzales had his office, was only slightly less claustrophobic, with small windows jammed against the low ceiling. I was relieved when we sat. Gonzales, the White House counsel who had worked for Bush when he was governor of Texas, was a warm, friendly, and almost painfully soft-spoken person. Most conversations with him involved awkward pauses. I don’t remember him asking me much at my “interview” to be deputy attorney general. He said the White House was looking for someone “strong enough to stand up to John Ashcroft.” He wanted to know whether I thought I could do that.

  That struck me as an odd question to ask about the president’s handpicked attorney general. But, as I was quickly learning, Washington was a city where everyone seemed to question other people’s loyalties and motivations, most often when they weren’t in the room. Ashcroft was a conservative who had considered running for president in 2000, the year that saw George W. Bush elected. Although I couldn’t see it from my job in Manhattan, there was tension between the White House and Ashcroft over the perception that the attorney general was preparing his own political future and that his interests didn’t align entirely with President Bush’s. I didn’t know whether any of that was true, but assured the White House counsel that I would not be cowed by anyone and that I would always try to do the right thing. That answer seemed to satisfy him, at least then. Gonzales and the political higher-ups in the Bush White House approved me for the position; I met briefly with Ashcroft, who already knew me well; and in December 2003, I moved into an office at Department of Justice headquarters and began moving the family to the Washington suburbs.

  The job of deputy attorney general came with a staff of about twenty lawyers to help with the heavy workload and the various demands of a hundred others who reported directly to me. Although I had been in federal law enforcement for fifteen years, the DAG position was my first chance to work on a near-daily basis with cabinet members. My immediate boss, of course, was John Ashcroft, who, despite Gonzales’s implication, I found to be warm, decent, and committed to his job over his own ambitions. We were cordial with each other but never close, something I attributed to the eighteen-year gap in our ages and our very different styles. Although he laughed easily and enjoyed team sports—I had once played a rough game of basketball against him and failed, despite great effort, to knock him down—Ashcroft was formal in many respects. A deeply religious man, he didn’t dance or drink or curse, and he disdained some of the more colorful turns of phrase I liked to use.

  One day he held me back after a meeting in his office to gently chastise me for the language I used in a meeting that had just ended. He explained that he viewed the office in which he sat as something he held in trust for the American people. I said I very much agreed. He went on, “Given that, I would ask that you be attentive to your language.”

  I gave him a blank look, because I couldn’t recall using any epithets in the meeting that had just ended. I didn’t curse much, but I did on occasion, for emphasis and effect.

  “What did I say?” I asked, mystified.

  He looked visibly uncomfortable at the prospect of repeating what I had said. It must have been an F-bomb, I reasoned. How could I not remember that?

  “It rhymes with ‘word,’” Ashcroft finally said.

  I racked my brain for four-letter words that fit his description. Then I remembered. At some point during our discussion about a case, I used the word “turd,” as in the phrase “turd in the punch bowl.” Trying not to smile, I apologized and said I would be more careful in the future.

  My position also occasionally afforded me the privilege of visiting the Oval Office. My first visit was in late 2003 when I substituted for Attorney General Ashcroft at President Bush’s daily terrorism threat briefing. For years after 9/11, every morning President Bush was in town, he met with the leaders of the counterterrorism agencies—which included the FBI and the Department of Justice. I was nervous about these meetings for a couple of reasons. Obviously, I didn’t want to embarrass myself or my department by saying anything stupid. But I was also going to a meeting with the president of the United States in an office that is hallowed ground in the life of my country. And in 2003, two years after the 9/11 attacks, there was no higher-priority agenda item than what we were discussing.

  This was my first meeting with the leader of the free world. As I sat there, I couldn’t get over how brightly lit the place was. There was a ring of lights in the recessed ceiling that lit the place like the noonday sun. I didn’t have to speak in this meeting unless called upon, so I let my eyes sweep over the faces that were familiar from TV—the president, Vice President Dick Cheney, FBI Director Bob Mueller, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge.

  In that moment, something hit me:
It’s just us. I always thought that in this place there would be somebody better, but it’s just this group of people—including me—trying to figure stuff out. I didn’t mean that as an insult to any of the participants, who were talented people. But we were just people, ordinary people in extraordinary roles in challenging times. I’m not sure what I had expected, but I met the top of the pyramid and it was just us, which was both comforting and a bit frightening. Suddenly Bob Dylan was in my head, singing, “What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.”

  * * *

  One of the first cases that I stepped into in my new role at the Justice Department was another case about lying in the justice system. In June 2003, a couple of months after the invasion of Iraq, an article by reporter Robert Novak had revealed the name of a covert CIA employee. The revelation had come days after the CIA employee’s husband had written a newspaper opinion piece attacking one of the Bush administration’s main rationales for the war in Iraq, namely that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear material. Speculation was rampant that members of the Bush administration had illegally disclosed the name of this CIA employee to Novak in retaliation for the negative article.

  Novak attributed his reporting to two Bush administration sources. As the scandal widened, it soon became apparent that at least three, and as many as six, Bush officials had spoken to reporters about the covert CIA employee. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was one official who freely admitted mentioning the CIA employee’s name to Novak. In fact, he had called the Justice Department shortly after the investigation began. He explained that he hadn’t intended to reveal classified information; he had just been gossiping with Novak and didn’t realize what he had done. The identity of Novak’s second source was President Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove. Rove had had a conversation with Novak, in which Novak mentioned that the author of the critical opinion piece on Iraq was married to a CIA employee. Rove said something like, “Oh, you heard that, too.” Although it doesn’t seem like great journalistic craft, Novak took this as a confirmation of what he had learned from Armitage.