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(I don't have much use for either Comey or Kakutani but this is an
interesting review.)
NY Times, April 13, 2018
James Comey Has a Story to Tell. It’s Very Persuasive.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
A HIGHER LOYALTY
Truth, Lies, and Leadership
By James Comey
290 pages. Flatiron Books. $29.99.
In his absorbing new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” the former F.B.I.
director James B. Comey calls the Trump presidency a “forest fire” that
is doing serious damage to the country’s norms and traditions.
“This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional
values,” Comey writes. “His leadership is transactional, ego driven and
about personal loyalty.”
Decades before he led the F.B.I.’s investigation into whether members of
Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election,
Comey was a career prosecutor who helped dismantle the Gambino crime
family; and he doesn’t hesitate in these pages to draw a direct analogy
between the Mafia bosses he helped pack off to prison years ago and the
current occupant of the Oval Office.
A February 2017 meeting in the White House with Trump and then chief of
staff Reince Priebus left Comey recalling his days as a federal
prosecutor facing off 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.” An earlier visit to Trump Tower in January made Comey think
about the New York Mafia social clubs he knew as a Manhattan prosecutor
in the 1980s and 1990s — “The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Café Giardino.”
The central themes that Comey returns to throughout this impassioned
book are the toxic consequences of lying; and the corrosive effects of
choosing loyalty to an individual over truth and the rule of law.
Dishonesty, he writes, was central “to the entire enterprise of
organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic,” and so, too, were
bullying, peer pressure and groupthink — repellent traits shared by
Trump and company, he suggests, and now infecting our culture.
“We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country,” Comey writes,
“with a political environment where basic facts are disputed,
fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized and unethical
behavior is ignored, excused or rewarded.”
“A Higher Loyalty” is the first big memoir by a key player in the
alarming melodrama that is the Trump administration. Comey, who was
abruptly fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017, has worked in three
administrations, and his book underscores just how outside presidential
norms Trump’s behavior has been — how ignorant he is about his basic
duties as president, and how willfully he has flouted the checks and
balances that safeguard our democracy, including the essential
independence of the judiciary and law enforcement. Comey’s book fleshes
out the testimony he gave before the Senate Intelligence Committee in
June 2017 with considerable emotional detail, and it showcases its
author’s gift for narrative — a skill he clearly honed during his days
as United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The volume offers little in the way of hard news revelations about
investigations by the F.B.I. or the special counsel Robert S. Mueller
III (not unexpectedly, given that such investigations are ongoing and
involve classified material), and it lacks the rigorous legal analysis
that made Jack Goldsmith’s 2007 book “The Terror Presidency” so incisive
about larger dynamics within the Bush administration.
What “A Higher Loyalty” does give readers are some near-cinematic
accounts of what Comey was thinking when, as he’s previously said, Trump
demanded loyalty from him during a one-on-one dinner at the White House;
when Trump pressured him to let go of the investigation into his former
national security adviser Michael T. Flynn; and when the president asked
what Comey could do to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation.
There are some methodical explanations in these pages of the reasoning
behind the momentous decisions Comey made regarding Hillary Clinton’s
emails during the 2016 campaign — explanations that attest to his
nonpartisan and well-intentioned efforts to protect the independence of
the F.B.I., but that will leave at least some readers still questioning
the judgment calls he made, including the different approaches he took
in handling the bureau’s investigation into Clinton (which was made
public) and its investigation into the Trump campaign (which was handled
with traditional F.B.I. secrecy).
“A Higher Loyalty” also provides sharp sketches of key players in three
presidential administrations. Comey draws a scathing portrait of Vice
President Dick Cheney’s legal adviser David S. Addington, who
spearheaded the arguments of many hard-liners in the George W. Bush
White House; Comey describes their point of view: “The war on terrorism
justified stretching, if not breaking, the written law.” He depicts Bush
national security adviser and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
as uninterested in having a detailed policy discussion of interrogation
policy and the question of torture. He takes Barack Obama’s attorney
general Loretta Lynch to task for asking him to refer to the Clinton
email case as a “matter,” not an “investigation.” (Comey tartly notes
that “the F.B.I. didn’t do ‘matters.’”) And he compares Trump’s attorney
general, Jeff Sessions, to Alberto R. Gonzales, who served in the same
position under Bush, writing that both were “overwhelmed and overmatched
by the job,” but “Sessions lacked the kindness Gonzales radiated.”
Comey is what Saul Bellow called a “first-class noticer.” He notices,
for instance, “the soft white pouches under” Trump’s “expressionless
blue eyes”; coyly observes that the president’s hands are smaller than
his own “but did not seem unusually so”; and points out that he never
saw Trump laugh — a sign, Comey suspects, of his “deep insecurity, his
inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor
of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a
little scary in a president.”
During his Senate testimony last June, Comey was boy-scout polite
(“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”) and somewhat elliptical in explaining
why he decided to write detailed memos after each of his encounters with
Trump (something he did not do with Presidents Obama or Bush), talking
gingerly about “the nature of the person I was interacting with.” Here,
however, Comey is blunt about what he thinks of the president, comparing
Trump’s demand for loyalty over dinner to “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra
induction ceremony — with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking
me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’”
Throughout his tenure in the Bush and Obama administrations (he served
as deputy attorney general under Bush, and was selected to lead the
F.B.I. by Obama in 2013), Comey was known for his fierce, go-it-alone
independence, and Trump’s behavior catalyzed his worst fears — that the
president symbolically wanted the leaders of the law enforcement and
national security agencies to come “forward and kiss the great man’s
ring.” Comey was feeling unnerved from the moment he met Trump. In his
recent book “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff wrote that Trump “invariably
thought people found him irresistible,” and felt sure, early on, that
“he could woo and flatter the F.B.I. director into positive feeling for
him, if not outright submission” (in what the reader takes as yet
another instance of the president’s inability to process reality or step
beyond his own narcissistic delusions).
After he failed to get that submission and the Russia cloud continued to
hover, Trump fired Comey; the following day he told Russian officials
during a meeting in the Oval Office that firing the F.B.I. director —
whom he called “a real nut job” — relieved “great pressure” on him. A
week later, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special
counsel overseeing the investigation into ties between the Trump
campaign and Russia.
During Comey’s testimony, one senator observed that the often
contradictory accounts that the president and former F.B.I. director
gave of their one-on-one interactions came down to “Who should we
believe?” As a prosecutor, Comey replied, he used to tell juries trying
to evaluate a witness that “you can’t cherry-pick” — “You can’t say, ‘I
like these things he said, but on this, he’s a dirty, rotten liar.’ You
got to take it all together.”
Put the two men’s records, their reputations, even their respective
books, side by side, and it’s hard to imagine two more polar opposites
than Trump and Comey: They are as antipodean as the untethered,
sybaritic Al Capone and the square, diligent G-man Eliot Ness in Brian
De Palma’s 1987 movie “The Untouchables”; or the vengeful outlaw Frank
Miller and Gary Cooper’s stoic, duty-driven marshal Will Kane in Fred
Zinnemann’s 1952 classic “High Noon.”
One is an avatar of chaos with autocratic instincts and a resentment of
the so-called “deep state” who has waged an assault on the institutions
that uphold the Constitution.
The other is a straight-arrow bureaucrat, an apostle of order and the
rule of law, whose reputation as a defender of the Constitution was
indelibly shaped by his decision, one night in 2004, to rush to the
hospital room of his boss, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, to prevent
Bush White House officials from persuading the ailing Ashcroft to
reauthorize an N.S.A. surveillance program that members of the Justice
Department believed violated the law.
One uses language incoherently on Twitter and in person, emitting a
relentless stream of lies, insults, boasts, dog-whistles, divisive
appeals to anger and fear, and attacks on institutions, individuals,
companies, religions, countries, continents.
Mr. Comey, a former federal prosecutor, writes that he laments the ways
dishonesty is “infecting our culture.” Credit Stephen Voss/Redux
The other chooses his words carefully to make sure there is “no fuzz” to
what he is saying, someone so self-conscious about his reputation as a
person of integrity that when he gave his colleague James R. Clapper,
then director of national intelligence, a tie decorated with little
martini glasses, he made sure to tell him it was a regift from his
brother-in-law.
One is an impulsive, utterly transactional narcissist who, so far in
office, The Washington Post calculated, has made an average of six false
or misleading claims a day; a winner-take-all bully with a nihilistic
view of the world. “Be paranoid,” he advises in one of his own books. In
another: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”
The other wrote his college thesis on religion and politics, embracing
Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that “the Christian must enter the political
realm in some way” in order to pursue justice, which keeps “the strong
from consuming the weak.”
Until his cover was blown, Comey shared nature photographs on Twitter
using the name “Reinhold Niebuhr,” and both his 1982 thesis and this
memoir highlight how much Niebuhr’s work resonated with him. They also
attest to how a harrowing experience he had as a high school senior —
when he and his brother were held captive, in their parents’ New Jersey
home, by an armed gunman — must have left him with a lasting awareness
of justice and mortality.
Long passages in Comey’s thesis are also devoted to explicating the
various sorts of pride that Niebuhr argued could afflict human beings —
most notably, moral pride and spiritual pride, which can lead to the sin
of self-righteousness. And in “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey provides an
inventory of his own flaws, writing that he can be “stubborn, prideful,
overconfident and driven by ego.”
Those characteristics can sometimes be seen in Comey’s account of his
handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, wherein he seems to
have felt a moral imperative to address, in a July 2016 press
conference, what he described as her “extremely careless” handling of
“very sensitive, highly classified information,” even though he went on
to conclude that the bureau recommend no charges be filed against her.
His announcement marked a departure from precedent in that it was done
without coordination with Department of Justice leadership and offered
more detail about the bureau’s evaluation of the case than usual.
As for his controversial disclosure on Oct. 28, 2016, 11 days before the
election, that the F.B.I. was reviewing more Clinton emails that might
be pertinent to its earlier investigation, Comey notes here that he had
assumed from media polling that Clinton was going to win. He has
repeatedly asked himself, he writes, whether he was influenced by that
assumption: “It is entirely possible that, because I was making
decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the
next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by
concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would
have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in
all polls. But I don’t know.”
He adds that he hopes “very much that what we did — what I did — wasn’t
a deciding factor in the election.” In testimony before the Senate
Judiciary Committee on May 3, 2017, Comey stated that the very idea that
his decisions might have had an impact on the outcome of the
presidential race left him feeling “mildly nauseous” — or, as one of his
grammatically minded daughters corrected him, “nauseated.”
Trump was reportedly infuriated by Comey’s “nauseous” remark; less than
a week later he fired the F.B.I. director — an act regarded by some
legal scholars as possible evidence of obstruction of justice, and that
quickly led to the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller and
an even bigger cloud over the White House.
It’s ironic that Comey, who wanted to shield the F.B.I. from politics,
should have ended up putting the bureau in the midst of the 2016
election firestorm; just as it’s ironic (and oddly fitting) that a civil
servant who has prided himself on being apolitical and independent
should find himself reviled by both Trump and Clinton, and thrust into
the center of another tipping point in history.
They are ironies that would have been appreciated by Comey’s hero
Niebuhr, who wrote as much about the limits, contingencies and
unforeseen consequences of human decision-making as he did about the
dangers of moral complacency and about the necessity of entering the
political arena to try to make a difference.
Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic for The New York Times, is
the author of the forthcoming book “The Death of Truth: Notes on
Falsehood in the Age of Trump.” Follow her on Twitter: @michikokakutani
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