Midway through former FBI head James Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty, the author broaches one of the darkest episodes in the bureau’s history: its attempt in the 1960s under Director J. Edgar Hoover to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide. This shameful act, one of many by the FBI under Hoover, came after the bureau, fearing communist infiltration, wiretapped King’s associates and then King himself following the March on Washington in 1963. Comey reveals that it was Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General at the time, who signed off on the King surveillance request. Comey tells us he kept a copy of the signed request on his desk, to warn himself against FBI overreach.
In a book largely dedicated to defending the FBI as an honorable and non-partisan organization, this is an admirable inclusion. While much of the media attention on the book has focused on Comey’s trivial digs at Trump—his observations about Trump’s orange skin, white eye rings, and comments like “Do I look like a guy who needs hookers?”—there is much more to the book than this.
As a piece of history, A Higher Loyalty is riveting. Comey’s accounts of the Bush Administration’s legal battles over surveillance and torture; the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails; and his dealings with three presidents are especially compelling.
That said, Donald Trump is unquestionably Comey’s main subject. The book is a clear retort to the President’s attacks on Comey and the FBI, and its virtues or lack thereof must be evaluated in this light.
Comey’s thesis is twofold: that Donald Trump does not possess the leadership skills required to be an effective president; and that Trump’s claims that the FBI is engaged in a conspiracy against him are ludicrous. Comey develops the first part of his thesis by portraying Trump as an insecure, incurious, authoritarian bereft of key leadership qualities like honesty, humility, empathy, and the ability to entertain dissenting viewpoints. These are not new observations, of course, and Trump haters will yell “I knew it!” while revelling in the bizarre details of his dinner conversation. But if one of Comey’s goals with A Higher Loyalty is to persuade people who voted for Trump that he is unworthy of their support, the book is only a modest success.
The unacknowledged backdrop to Comey’s account is, despite the inclusion of the MLK story and a few references to Hoover’s authoritarianism, the intelligence community’s own long history of skulduggery. After all, Trump is able to convince his supporters that Russian election meddling is “fake news” and that the FBI is part of a conspiracy because of this shameful history.
Seventeen intelligence agencies agree that Russia tried to get Trump elected? Well, the President’s supporters scoff, what about the CIA’s coups in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil; and the NSA’s secret spying on U.S. citizens? Our intelligence agencies lied to us in those cases, they can argue, so they’re probably lying to us again. (At one point in the book, Comey even declares his great respect for James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence, who lied to Congress in 2013 when he said that the NSA does not collect data on average Americans.)
Comey’s book makes a powerful case that our forty-fifth president is unfit for the job. The groundwork for his argument is laid in its opening chapters—which cover Comey’s early career, his childhood, and watershed moments in his life. Comey juxtaposes the admirable traits of his early role models with the less admirable traits of President Trump. His role models were great leaders because they balanced toughness with compassion and humility, he argues, while Trump reminds him of the mafia bosses he once prosecuted.
One early chapter particularly resonates. It’s about how small lies quickly become big ones. Comey recounts his prosecution of Martha Stewart for insider trading and explains that he pursued the case because Stewart blatantly lied to the FBI, apparently believing her elite status would give her a pass. After observing that the wealthy almost never get indicted for such crimes, yet 2,000 “regular people” were prosecuted for the same crime the previous year, Comey decided to prosecute Stewart.
Martha Stewart blatantly lied to the FBI, apparently believing her elite status would give her a pass. Comey decided to prosecute.
On a more personal note, Comey tells of his one-time habit of lying to strangers who asked if he played college basketball. Reluctant to explain why, as a six-foot-eight man, he did not ever play, he found it easier to say he did. Then he started lying to friends. He lied about it so frequently that he almost started believing it. “Liars become so good at lying,” he writes, “because they lose the ability to distinguish between what’s true and what’s not. They surround themselves with other liars.” Eventually, he says, “those unwilling to surrender their moral compasses get pushed out and those willing to tolerate deceit brought closer to the center of power.”
The drama in Comey’s book increases with each chapter as we anticipate Comey’s final showdown with Trump. But the sections before the denouement are also fascinating. Comey’s telling of his tenure in the Bush and Obama Administrations offer compelling history. His recounting of the race to John Ashcroft’s hospital bedside to prevent the renewal of an NSA spying program; the battles with Dick Cheney over “enhanced interrogations;” and his private meetings with Trump all seem straight out of a blockbuster political thriller.
Critically, however, Comey’s justification for announcing the reopening of the Clinton investigation two weeks before the 2016 Presidential election, after discovering her emails on Anthony Weiner’s personal laptop, is far from satisfying. Comey says he engaged in much soul searching over the matter, ultimately deciding upon “transparency.” He never considers a possible a third choice besides speaking out or keeping quiet: announcing that the Trump campaign was also being investigated.
If his underlying motivation was transparency, we are left wondering why revealing the existence of both investigations would not have been the fairest act.
Is Comey an egomaniac with an axe to grind, as many have claimed? To the contrary, the values he espouses are good ones and he engages in much self-criticism in the book. A long-time Republican, Comey expresses a high regard for Barack Obama after initially opposing him. He occasionally displays a self-righteous tendency, but by the final pages Comey convinces you that he is indeed a principled, if flawed, truth-seeker.
“Whatever your politics,” he writes of people who remain quiet in the age of Trump, “it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check.”
By denigrating the FBI and firing Comey as its director, Trump has indeed undermined confidence in an institution that checks his power. This is the same strategy Trump uses when attacking the press, judiciary, and our other intelligence agencies. But as correct as Comey is on this point, America still needs a public reckoning of the travesties that our intelligence agencies have inflicted on countless people here and around the globe.
In A Higher Loyalty, Comey makes a powerful plea for America to return to being a nation dedicated to truth. We will never again be that nation—if we ever were—without such a reckoning.
Jake Whitney is a journalist based in New York. In addition to The Progressive, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Daily Beast, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other publications.
A letter sent anonymously by the FBI to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964.