A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

In the middle of that firestorm, the attorney general rejected calls that she recuse herself from the Hillary Clinton investigation altogether. Instead, on Friday, July 1, she chose a very strange position—that she would not remove herself, but she would accept my recommendation about the case and that of the career prosecutors at Justice. In effect, she was removing herself but not removing herself. Again, very strange.

  Given the attorney general’s tortured half-out, half-in approach, I again considered calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor. The appointment of a special prosecutor—someone outside the normal chain of command and with powers to ensure independence—was, as noted, a rare step. But I decided it would be brutally unfair to do that. This was not a political decision, but an ethical one, driven by our values. Any subject of an investigation is entitled to be treated fairly. A world-class FBI team had investigated Hillary Clinton for a year, and all of them—to a person—believed there was no prosecutable case. Calling for a special prosecutor now would wrongly imply there was something to the case, which would then drag on for many months, if not longer. And it would give a false impression to the American people; in other words, it would be a lie.

  For years, I have spoken of the reservoir of trust and credibility that makes possible all the good we do at the FBI and the Department of Justice. When we stand up, whether in a courtroom or at a cookout, and identify ourselves as part of those institutions, total strangers believe what we say, because of that reservoir. Without it, we are just another partisan player in a polarized world. When we tell a judge or a jury or Congress what we saw, or found, or heard, they are not hearing it from a Republican or a Democrat. They are hearing it from an entity that is separate and apart in American life. The FBI must be an “other” in this country or we are lost. I have always used the reservoir metaphor because it captures both the immensity of it and how quickly it can be drained away by a hole in the dam. How could I protect the reservoir standing behind an attorney general who appeared politically compromised? The FBI was independent and apolitical, and the American people needed to see that.

  To protect that reservoir, I made a decision. I needed to visibly step away from Loretta Lynch and do something I never could have imagined before 2016: have the FBI separately offer its views to the American people as soon as possible, by making public my recommendation and the thinking behind it. I knew this was going to suck for me. From the Democratic side would come predictable stuff about my wanting the spotlight, being out of control, driven by ego. From the Republican side would come more allegations of Justice Department incompetence or corruption. And it could forever sour my relationship with the leadership of the Justice Department. But I believed—and still believe, even in hindsight—it was the best thing for the FBI and for the Department of Justice.

  The American people needed and deserved transparency, and I believed that I had the independent reputation to step out front and take the hits to protect the reservoir.

  As things stood, I was going to step to a podium on Tuesday morning, July 5, in FBI headquarters and end this case. Unless, of course, Hillary Clinton lied to us when we finally conducted our interview with her, on July 2, 2016.

  * * *

  Many pundits have questioned why the FBI waited so long to interrogate Secretary Clinton when she was the subject of the inquiry. That is exactly the reason. Experienced investigators always avoid conducting interviews with subjects who know more about the facts than they do. That knowledge imbalance favors the subject, not the investigator. Especially in white-collar crime cases, investigators prefer to master all of the facts before questioning the subject, so that interrogators can ask smart questions and so the subject can be confronted, as necessary, with documents or statements made by other witnesses. That is what the FBI did in every standard investigation; and that is what the Midyear team did with Hillary Clinton. The agents and analysts of the FBI spent a year learning all they could about how Secretary Clinton set up and used her personal email system. Now we were ready to see if, under extensive questioning, she would lie to us about any of it and whether we could prove she had lied. In white-collar criminal cases, we often find that a subject will lie to cover up bad behavior, offering us a way to prosecute even where we can’t make a case on the substantive charges that started the case. It is unlikely that a sophisticated, well-represented person will lie in a way we can prove, but Stewart and Libby show it can happen. The Clinton interview, while coming at the end of our investigation, was extremely important.

  The Department of Justice prosecutors and Secretary Clinton’s lawyers set the Saturday morning of the Independence Day three-day weekend for her interview, which would take place at FBI headquarters in Washington.

  There has been so much misinformation spread about the nature of this interview that the actual events that took place merit discussion. After being discreetly delivered by the Secret Service to the FBI’s basement garage, Hillary Clinton was interviewed by a five-member joint FBI and Department of Justice team. She was accompanied by five members of her legal team. None of Clinton’s lawyers who were there remained investigative subjects in the case at that point. The interview, which went on for more than three hours, was conducted in a secure conference room deep inside FBI headquarters and led by the two senior special agents on the case. With the exception of the secret entry to the FBI building, they treated her like any other interview subject. I was not there, which only surprises those who don’t know the FBI and its work. The director does not attend these kinds of interviews. My job was to make final decisions on the case, not to conduct the investigation. We had professional investigators, schooled on all of the intricacies of the case, assigned to do that. We also as a matter of procedure don’t tape interviews of people not under arrest. We instead have professionals who take detailed notes. Secretary Clinton was not placed under oath during the interview, but this too was standard procedure. The FBI doesn’t administer oaths during voluntary interviews. Regardless, under federal law, it would still have been a felony if Clinton was found to have lied to the FBI during her interview, whether she was under oath or not. In short, despite a whole lot of noise in the media and Congress after the fact, the agents interviewed Hillary Clinton following the FBI’s standard operating procedures.

  I spent a long time on the phone with the Midyear team leaders that afternoon hearing their report of what Secretary Clinton had said. None of it surprised the professionals who had spent hundreds if not thousands of hours over the past year circling the former secretary, reading thousands of her emails and interviewing all those around her. By Clinton’s account, she was unsophisticated both about technology and security, used the personal account for convenience to avoid maintaining dual government and personal email accounts, and still didn’t consider the contents of the emails to be classified. Her lack of technological sophistication is evident in her memoir, What Happened, in which she seems to intimate that her private server in Chappaqua was protected from hacking because it was contained in a home guarded by the Secret Service. Hacking a server is done through the internet, not by breaking the glass in a basement window. She also said in her interview that she believed she and her staff had successfully “talked around” sensitive topics, a method of operating made necessary by the State Department’s poor communications infrastructure, which didn’t provide secure and reliable email and phone for her and her senior staff. There was some truth to this, but although frustrating to her team, it didn’t change the rules around classified information. Also in her interview, Clinton said she delegated the review and deletion of her emails to others, believed they were only deleting purely personal emails, and had no knowledge of any efforts to obstruct justice.

  After discussion and careful review of her answers, there was nothing in her comments that we could prove was a lie beyond a reasonable doubt. There was no moment when investigators caught her in a lie. She did not at any point confess wrongdoing or indicate that she knew what she had done w
ith her emails was wrong. Whether we believed her or not, we had no significant proof otherwise. And there was no additional work the investigators thought they should do. This case was done. Now the American people needed to know what the FBI had found.

  I spent Sunday and Monday with the team, working on the announcement. We decided to do it live and in person so that people heard it all at once, and we worked hard to maintain the professional, nonpartisan tone we intended. We would keep it short and take no questions, but try to offer as much detail and transparency as possible. We believed that the details of what we did and what we found were essential to the credibility of the investigation and the announcement. Every word of the statement was reviewed by the FBI legal team to ensure it was consistent with the law and Department of Justice policy.

  I was nervous on the morning of July 5, for a bunch of reasons. It felt like I was about to damage my career. That’s okay, I told myself; you are fifty-five years old, you have money in the bank and a ten-year term, and you don’t want to be anything else; you aren’t trying to climb anyplace. I was also nervous because I liked both the attorney general and the deputy attorney general and I was about to piss them off by not coordinating with them on a public statement about a high-profile case because any coordination could be perceived as political influence. Although I felt duty bound to call them before my announcement to tell them I was doing it, I was also not going to tell them what I was about to say. Awkward.

  When I called Sally Yates, I told her I was about to make an announcement on the Clinton case and that I was not coordinating my statement with the Justice Department. When I gave her this news, she asked no questions. Although I have never spoken to her about it, I think Yates understood what I was doing and why, and appreciated it. Attorney General Lynch’s response was a little different. She asked only, “What will you be recommending?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to answer that,” I replied. “It’s very important that I not have coordinated this in any way with the department. I hope someday you will understand why.” She said nothing.

  I hung up and walked out of my office. I stopped on the way to authorize the release of an email to the entire FBI. I wanted them to hear from me first:

  To all:

  As I send this, I am about to walk downstairs to deliver a statement to the media about our investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email server during her time as Secretary of State. I have attached a copy of the statement I intend to give. You will notice immediately that I am going to provide more detail about our process than we normally would in connection with an investigation, including our recommendation to Justice that no charges be brought. I am doing that because I think the confidence of the American people in the FBI is a precious thing, and I want them to understand that we did this investigation in a competent, honest, and independent way. Folks outside the FBI may disagree about the result, but I don’t want there to be any doubt that this was done in an apolitical and professional way and that our conclusion is honestly held, carefully considered, and ours alone. I have not coordinated or reviewed my statement with anyone except a small group of FBI officials who worked on the investigation. Nobody elsewhere in government has any idea what I am about to say, and that’s the way it should be.

  There is a lot of the pronoun “I” above, but this investigation and the conclusion are the product of a large and talented FBI team, made up of agents, analysts, technical experts, lawyers, and others. I have stayed close to it simply to ensure that the team had the resources they needed and that nobody interfered with them. Nobody did. I am proud to represent their work, and the entire FBI. We have done it the way the American people expect and deserve.

  I was intentionally wearing a gold tie so I wasn’t displaying either of the normal political gang colors, red or blue. I thought about trying to memorize the statement, but we kept making little word changes up to the end, making that impossible. My crack public affairs team figured out how to project the text on the back wall of the room so I could track it as I spoke.

  I’ve taken some abuse, including from my beloved family, for “Seacresting it,” by which they mean imitating the dramatic tease—“but first, this commercial”—of TV host Ryan Seacrest. I didn’t intend to, but I can see what they meant. My thinking was that if I started with the conclusion that we were recommending no charges, nobody would listen to the rest of what I said. And the rest of what I said was critical to the American people having confidence that the FBI had been competent, honest, and independent.

  As I expected, people on both sides of the partisan divide in Washington were very angry. Republicans were furious that I had failed to recommend prosecution in a case that “obviously” warranted it. This, as I’ve noted, was absurd. No fair-minded person with any experience in the counterespionage world (where “spills” of classified information are investigated and prosecuted) could think this was a case the career prosecutors at the Department of Justice might pursue. There was literally zero chance of that. Democrats were furious because I had “defamed” Hillary Clinton by describing and criticizing her conduct in detail and yet recommending no charges.

  There was shouting from both sides about my “violation” of Department of Justice policies. But in appropriate cases, where the public interest requires it, the Department of Justice has long revealed details about the conduct of uncharged people. The department had done so in the spring of 2015 after the FBI’s investigation of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—including releasing an eighty-page memo detailing the entire investigation. They did it again in October 2015, in the case against IRS supervisor Lois Lerner, when the department laid out evidence gathered during a criminal investigation into whether the IRS had targeted and harassed Tea Party groups. The department said Lerner had used “poor judgment,” but that “ineffective management is not a crime.… What occurred is disquieting and may necessitate corrective action—but it does not warrant criminal prosecution.” Like those recent examples, this was a case where public interest and public confidence required that we explain what we had learned about Secretary Clinton’s conduct. The result would have been far less credible and transparent without those details, causing damage to our Justice institutions’ reservoir of trust with the American people. What made this unusual was that the FBI director—to protect both institutions—was stepping out front to make the announcement separate from the Department of Justice leadership. That decision was made knowing it put me and my professional reputation directly in the line of fire from all sides of the political spectrum.

  Hindsight is always helpful, and if I had it to do over again, I would do some things differently. I would avoid the “Seacresting” mistake by saying at the beginning of my statement that we weren’t recommending charges. At the time, I thought there was a risk people wouldn’t listen carefully after the headline, but looking back, the risk of confusion from me delaying the conclusion was greater. More important, I would have tried to find a better way to describe Secretary Clinton’s conduct than “extremely careless.” Republicans jumped on the old statute making it a felony to handle classified information in a “grossly negligent” way—a statute that Justice would never use in this case. But my use of “extremely careless” naturally sounded to many ears like the statutory language—“grossly negligent”—even though thoughtful lawyers could see why it wasn’t the same. I spent hours responding to congressional questions about it, and it became a talking point for those interested in attacking the FBI and the Department of Justice. Other than those two things, and in spite of the political shots directed at me since—and my supposedly being fired because of it—I would do the same thing again at that announcement, because I still believe it was the best available alternative to protect and preserve the Department of Justice’s and the FBI’s reservoir of trust with the American people.

  After a September congressional hearing, despite all of the criticism, at least I could say the B
ureau was rid of this awful case. We had offered transparency, tried to show the American people competence, honesty, and independence, and now the presidential campaign could run its course. Months later, during our January 27, 2017, dinner, President Trump told me that I had “saved her” with my July press conference. That was not my intention, just as I did not intend to “save him” with what came later. The goal was to tell the truth and demonstrate what higher loyalty—to the institutions of justice—looks like.

  So my deputy director was right; we really were screwed, and it was as painful as anticipated. We had tasted the poison of our political system, and I had taken all the hits I anticipated, but I also felt great relief because the FBI and I were finished with Hillary Clinton and her emails.

  If only.

  CHAPTER 11

  SPEAK OR CONCEAL

  Safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.

  —ROBERT H. JACKSON, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE

  ALTHOUGH THE CLINTON email case seemed like the center of the universe to the Washington political class, the FBI was actually involved in many other important matters. During the summer of 2016, we were working like crazy to understand what the Russians were up to. Evidence within the intelligence community strongly suggested that 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, blaming her personally for large street demonstrations against him in Moscow in December 2011. Putin believed Clinton had given “a signal” to demonstrators by publicly criticizing what she called “troubling practices” before and during the parliamentary vote in Russia that year. She said, “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted.” Putin took that as an unforgivable personal attack.