James Comey loves the spotlight. The spotlight does not love him back.
In the harsh glare of the spotlight, you begin to see that it has never been enough for Comey to strive to be honest and ethical. You begin to see that his Achilles heel, his Kryptonite, is that he needs to see that image of himself reflected back to him by others, that he needs to be recognized by others to be honest and ethical.
That excessive concern for reputation is Comey’s fatal vanity, the flaw in an otherwise good man that helped to change the outcome of a presidential campaign and with it the course of American history.
For me, the first clear demonstration of that weakness came a year ago, in Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to standard Justice Department practice, Comey had taken it upon himself, as FBI director, to decide whether Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for using a private email server. Contrary to standard practice, he had also used a highly dramatic public setting to explain his decision not to prosecute. And contrary to practice, policy and function, Comey went well beyond questions of criminal liability to harshly criticize Clinton for what he called her “extremely careless” handling of classified material.
In the Senate hearing, Comey was asked whether he had any second thoughts about how he had handled that situation.
“Honestly, no,” Comey told the committee. “It caused a whole lot of personal pain for me but as I look back, given what I knew at the time and even what I’ve learned since, I think it was the best way to try to protect the justice institution, including the FBI … . I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation, which meant both the FBI and the Justice Department.”
I understood Comey’s concern, then and now. It is important that the FBI and Justice Department be seen as politically impartial, so that the American public can have faith in their work. In fact, that is one of the most worrisome aspects of Donald Trump’s ceaseless efforts to intimidate those agencies into serving his own narrow political and personal interests. When those agencies take actions that are seemingly responsive to Trump, such as the firing of Andrew McCabe, those actions are perceived as tainted even when they might be totally justified.
In Clinton’s case, it was the FBI’s responsibility to thoroughly investigate potential crime, and to close the books if no such crime was found. If that decision brought partisan criticism upon the agency, then the FBI as big boys and big girls had to ride that out. No federal law, no FBI guidebook or policy manual, gives its director the authority to try to soften that criticism by publicly passing judgment on non-criminal behavior.
In his current round of interviews, Comey returns over and over again, obsessively, to his concern that the FBI and the Department of Justice be perceived as fair. He acted as he did “to protect the institutions,” he says. “If I’d done the normal thing … the institutions would’ve been damaged … this is my obligation, to protect the FBI and the Justice Department.”
Nowhere does Comey come to grips with the fact that in supposedly trying to protect the reputation of the FBI and Justice Department, he was really protecting his own reputation, his own self-image. He became so caught up in proving that Jim Comey was invulnerable to partisan pressure that he made himself vulnerable to partisan pressure.
From that, tragic misjudgments and consequences have flowed.
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