James Comey Is No Hero
James Comey’s highly anticipated book, A Higher Loyalty, reportedly makes no secret of the disdain in which the former FBI director holds the president who fired him. Comey compares President Trump to a mob boss, calling him a liar living in a “cocoon of alternative reality” and a man who is “unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values.”
The most damning revelations in the published accounts of the memoir, however, are not Comey’s condemnations of Trump, but his disclosures of his own thinking when he made the decisions that helped put the current president in office.
In July of 2016, Comey held a press conference excoriating Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified information, but likely cost Clinton the election. At the same time that Comey was publicly discussing a federal investigation of Clinton, the FBI was investigating whether Trump’s campaign was aiding a Russian influence operation aimed at putting the real-estate mogul in office. Comey kept the latter secret. The investigation into Clinton found nothing new—the inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia is ongoing and has already led to guilty pleas from several former Trump campaign officials.
