Republicans threatened by the imminent release of James Comey’s memoir have launched a campaign to rebrand the former FBI director as “Lyin’ Comey”, in apparent hopes that a nickname (and a slapdash website) are enough to rewrite a reputation built on three decades of public service.
No matter that Comey is a Republican who was appointed twice by Republican president George W Bush to top federal posts, or that Comey’s career features a catalogue of prosecutions against targets such as crime syndicates, securities crooks and identity fraudsters.
A Methodist convert of Irish descent from New Jersey, Comey made his name cracking down on Virginia gun homicides and prosecuting international terrorism suspects.
Like his three main predecessors as FBI director, Comey is a lawyer, having earned his degree from the University of Chicago in 1985. Now 57, he has alternated in his career between big government jobs and lucrative positions in private practice, including with Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor, and Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, with $103bn in assets under management.
Before he was FBI director, the defining moment in Comey’s career came in 2004, when he made a dramatic nighttime hospital-room intervention to stop the George W Bush White House from strong-arming the bedridden attorney general John Ashcroft into reauthorizing a controversial surveillance program. But he remained at the justice department after the program – a bulk collection of Americans’ internet metadata – was allowed to move forward under a different legal rubric.
Leading up to his remarkably high-profile role in the 2016 presidential election, Comey had long enjoyed a reputation for fairness and public-minded integrity. “He doesn’t care about politics,” said Barack Obama upon nominating Comey to run the FBI in 2013. “He only cares about getting the job done.”
Eric Holder, the former attorney general, said in 2003: “Jim is a chess player. He’s thinking: ‘What’s the impact going to be one month, two months, six months from now?’”
Fifteen years later, that assessment, of Comey as a far-seeing strategist, has not aged particularly well. In July 2016, the FBI director took the highly unusual step of calling a news conference to discuss an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information over unsecured email. With the presidency seemingly at stake, Republicans howled at Comey’s announcement that the investigation had yielded no grounds for criminal prosecution. Democrats bridled at Comey’s assessment of Clinton’s email hygiene as “extremely careless”.
The drama was just getting started. In October 2016, just 11 days before the election, the FBI director was back, with a letter notifying Congress that the bureau was examining newly discovered material in its investigation of Clinton’s email. That sounded pretty bad for Clinton, and it made headlines across the country in the campaign’s home stretch. Then, just two days before the election, Comey sent a final letter, announcing that the new material (which turned out to be mostly old material) contained nothing of prosecutorial significance.
In the eyes of the Clinton camp, the result of Comey’s pen pal habit was plain. “James Comey cost her the election,” said Bill Clinton.
Donald Trump had a somewhat different take. “I’ll tell you what: what he did, he brought back his reputation,” Trump told reporters of Comey’s October surprise. “He brought it back.”
That attitude was not to last. Trump fired Comey as FBI director in June 2017, later saying he was thinking of “this Russia thing” – the investigation into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s possible collusion – when he decided to do so. Comey’s dismissal set in train Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, and the controversy has trailed Trump ever since.
Comey is a father of five and a foster parent, married to his undergraduate sweetheart. He cycles, plays squash and teaches Sunday school.