James Comey - Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust

The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.

UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, 1935

PUTIN TOLD ME, We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world. Donald Trump sat there bracketed by Bill Clintons gold Oval Office curtains, backlit by the fading late-afternoon February light. After only seventeen days in office, he hadnt finished decorating, but he liked gold and hated Obama, so his staff must have figured the old Clinton curtains would do for now. I could see them on either side of his bright, golden head, as he told me about Vladimir Putins view of Russias prostitutes.

I was director of the FBI, in the fourth year of a ten-year term. My mission was to protect the country from its adversaries, including an aggressive Russia, which had worked to elect the man now sitting across the Resolute desk from me, the one reminiscing to the FBIs leader about an off-color conversation with the Russian authoritarian.

Two weeks earlier, and just steps away, Donald Trumps national security adviser had blatantly lied to FBI agents about his conversations with the Russians. The Department of Justice was leaderless after Trump fired my boss, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, for refusing to enforce his Muslim ban immigration order, which was still causing chaos at the nations airports. The new president had already begun attacking the intelligence community, of which the FBI was a part. It wouldnt be long before he came for the entire Justice Department, which was trying to understand why all the lying, why all the links between people around Trump and Russia. The attacks on Justice and its values had just begun. It would go on for years, doing grievous damage to an indispensable American institution.

From the beginning, America built and nurtured institutions to find truth. For centuries, Lady Justice has been depicted wearing a blindfold. She seeks only to weigh the facts, and find the truth, without regard to the people before her. The Constitution gave federal judges jobs for life to protect them from any political pressure to lift the blindfold. The Department of Justice was built around the notion that federal prosecutors are, as the Supreme Court has explained, representing an ideajusticenot an ordinary client. And the attorney general is not the presidents personal lawyer. In the words of Robert Jackson, a former Supreme Court justice who held the top Justice job and served as chief Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor after World War II, the attorney general has a responsibility to others than the President. He is the legal officer of the United States.

Like America, the Department of Justice and the justice system more broadly have long been imperfect in pursuing inspiring ideals. People and the institutions they create always fall short, infected by biases, fears, and misguided passions. Justice has been no exception. Innocent people get convicted, too many brown and Black people go to jail, too many poor people lack decent representation in a system where the quality of justice often varies with the quality of your lawyer. There is a lot wrong with justice in America. But one of the things that has been right with American justice is the reality and reputation built by the United States Department of Justice over generations. Across those decades, and especially in the nearly five decades since Watergate, Justice employees came to be seen as a people apartstill flawed in all the ways humans are flawed, but somehow different and trustworthy. They could be trusted to sort out the most difficult situations, to investigate politicians, to wade into painful racial strife, to find and tell the American people the truth.

If Justice Department employees are no longer seen as something separate in American life, we are all less safe. If jurors, judges, victims, witnesses, communities, and cops come to see them as part of a political tribe, and so trust them less, something essential is lost.

Donald Trump, aided by his attorney general, William P. Barr, severely undermined the nations trust in the Department of Justice. Trump wasnt good at much, but he had an extraordinary ability to relentlessly cut at people and institutions he saw as threats. His death-by-a-thousand-lies approach was initially frustrated by his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who, for all his flaws, held to long-standing norms. He wouldnt order prosecutions the president wanted, and he stepped aside from the investigation of Russian interference because he had been a key member of the Trump campaign. When Trump fired Sessions, his replacement, Bill Barr, showed no such sensitivity to the departments values. From the beginning, Barr echoed the president, aping his dishonest characterizations of the departments work and appearing to respond to President Trumps self-interested demands for investigations and prosecutions. The Department of Justice was damaged by that. It was damaged again when the attorney general misled the American people about the work of the special counsel investigating the president. And again when the attorney general intervened in a case involving one of the presidents friends to overrule the sentencing recommendation of career prosecutors. And again when the attorney general intervened in an effort to drop a case in which a political ally of the president had already pleaded guilty, twice.

If we are to be a healthy nation, the damage must be repaired. This book is an attempt to help with that vital taskto remind Americans of how the institutions of justice should work, and how their leaders should behave. Ive had the good fortune to work in government in Republican and Democratic administrationsas a junior federal prosecutor, a United States Attorney, a Justice Department official, and the director of the FBIand will share stories from my work that illuminate the vital core values of American justice and why we must overcome and repair the corrosive damage Trump and his underlings have done with dishonesty, cronyism, political payback, and amorality.

I started my career in the Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where I handled many cases over six years and learned searing lessonsfrom my supervisors, my colleagues, and my own mistakesabout the Justice Departments obligation to tell the whole truth at all times, to force witnesses to do the same, and to care more about doing justice than winning. Next, three years as a private lawyer at a law firm taught me how hard defense work is, and reminded me that government prosecutors dont have a client in the normal sense of that word; instead, they represent the idea of justice. When I then returned to the Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor in Virginia for six more years, I still prosecuted casesand learned that part of telling the truth is keeping promisesbut my work was increasingly about leading others in the department, about the bigger picture of our impact on communities. I came to see that public trust in the Department of Justice was everything; without it, we couldnt do the essential work of keeping people safe. And to foster that trust, it wasnt enough just to tell the truth in courtrooms. We were obligated to be transparent, to tell our fellow citizens what we were doing, and why.