The move was classic James Comey. The former director of the FBI was due at a courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, at 10 a.m. to be arraigned on charges brought by a federal prosecutor who had been handpicked by President Donald Trump and was following his orders. The appearance was a formality, but Comey used it to send a message.
Comey showed up in the courtroom more than 20 minutes before the scheduled start of the hearing, arriving before the prosecution team or the judge. Maybe Comey had simply found a good parking spot. But his early entrance commanded the full attention of the assembled reporters. On one hand, Comey was projecting innocence and fortitude: I have nothing to fear. Let’s get started. On the other, Comey was—once again—saying, Look at me.
That tension, between rectitude and ego, has been at the core of Comey’s public career for decades. It shaped his choices, most infamously, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, when Comey, in his very public handling of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation, may have helped Trump win. Putting himself at the center of that mess set in motion the tangled chain of events that eventually made Comey a prime target of Trump’s anger and, now, retribution at the hands of his politicized Department of Justice.
Comey’s role in the 2016 election drama, plus the enormous legal and constitutional stakes of his impending trial, have made him the second-most-consequential FBI director in American history, after J. Edgar Hoover. “You could certainly make that case,” says Beverly Gage, who wrote G-Man, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Hoover. “When Comey was FBI director, he was more public and more interesting, even before Trump came along, than some of his predecessors, and more comfortable in the public eye. Now he has come to not only be a household name, but to represent a certain set of political conflicts.”
Comey’s prominence seems both accidental and inexorable. Formative parts of his life—an early fascination with religion; a bizarre and frightening childhood episode in which Comey and his brother faced a gun-toting home invader; the sudden death of his nine-day-old son—left Comey with a deep sense of right and wrong, and of the necessity for him to play an active role in fighting for the good guys. In 2003, when Comey was US attorney for the Southern District of New York, he told me, “It is our obligation as people not to let evil hold the field. Not to let bad win.” His victories included the convictions of Martha Stewart, for obstruction of justice, among other charges, connected to an insider trading case, and a telecom executive in a massive fraud scheme.
Comey, then a Republican, developed a reputation for affability and independence, and he was soon promoted from New York to Main Justice, in Washington, as the number two to then attorney general John Ashcroft. When Ashcroft became critically ill with pancreatitis, two White House aides went to his hospital bedside to try to get Ashcroft to reauthorize a domestic surveillance program that was expiring the next day. Comey rushed to the hospital to intercede. It was an act of bureaucratic and moral courage. But the episode became public, and Comey, after testifying about it before Congress, was seen as a hero, something that made even some of his allies uncomfortable. “You never want that story told,” a prosecutorial colleague from that period says. “That’s not the job. The job is protecting your boss and keeping it out of the public eye.”
Comey’s choices, and the spotlight, were even more glaring in 2016. After an FBI investigation found no basis on which to prosecute Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, for her use of a private email server while working as secretary of state, Comey nevertheless held a press conference during which he blasted Clinton as “extremely careless.” Then, 11 days before the election, Comey told Congress that the FBI was reopening the probe after Clinton-related emails were discovered on the laptop of former New York congressman Anthony Weiner.
Both moves were boons to Trump’s campaign. Yet even though he won in 2016, Trump became enraged by the FBI’s investigation into possible Russian meddling in the election. He eventually fired Comey. Trump has never forgiven him; rather, he has spent years spoiling to punish Comey, and the current prosecution is the payoff.
Comey’s unwillingness to yield the stage is surely part of what drives Trump crazy. He wrote a book, A Higher Loyalty, that was deeply critical of Trump, and he’s been a frequent cable-news guest and social media commentator. “Trump is obsessed with Comey. He’s less obsessed with some other people that have arguably wronged him worse. Because Jim is on TV, he’s in Trump’s sights more,” a Comey associate says. “Jim is a good man and a good leader, and he’s been wrongly tarred as an agent of politics. He’s been trying to be relevant and to show he hasn’t lost his moral shine all the years since then.”
The day the indictment was handed down, the 64-year-old Comey released a video in which he declared his innocence and said, “My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.” Once again, Comey was acting admirably, showing the kind of spine that more elected officials should display. He was also once again doing it in a way that made some of his friends cringe, even as they stress that they’re not blaming the victim. “A video response to your own indictment, posted on Instagram?” a former federal prosecutor who worked with Comey says. “I’ve never seen that. Not even from Trump.”
Which may actually be the genius part. Comey knows that the current battle, like just about everything connected to Trump, is as much a war of public relations as it is of legal tactics. The charges against Comey appear to be flimsy. Yet even if the case never makes it to trial, Trump has scored points by making an example of Comey, something that could intimidate others who might consider standing in the president’s way. Comey didn’t say much at his arraignment, letting Pat Fitzgerald, his defense lawyer and close friend, enter a not guilty plea on his behalf. But Comey’s Instagram post, and his early arrival in court, were statements of resistance. Last week, after her own indictment by the same federal prosecutor who is going after Comey at Trump’s behest, New York attorney general Letitia James followed the former FBI director’s lead by posting a video statement of her innocence, this time on X. “These charges are baseless,” James said. “This is the time for leaders on both sides of the aisle to speak out against this blatant perversion of our system of justice.”
Hoover, the FBI’s founding director, was a master of public relations for most of his career, and he used the bureau as a weapon, sometimes in service of his boss, the president. But even Hoover did not deal with the kind of relentless White House norm-shattering that has now been turned against Comey. “Richard Nixon wanted to politicize the bureaucracy—not just the FBI, but the whole administrative state—in the way Trump has talked about,” Gage, the Hoover historian, says. “Nixon tried and failed. It’s the closest thing we have. But it’s nothing, in scale and scope, compared to what’s happening now.”
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