A saying that has stayed with me is “You can’t hate someone if you know their story.” Well James Comey’s story A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership starts with this:

At age 16 he was held at gunpoint in his home by the “Ramsey Rapist” right after his parents left for a night out. [He was not raped; likely the rapist was after his sister who was not home.]

These and other details about his early life were not what I was expecting from this book, which I expected to be “all about Trump” based on media coverage.

First, this is actually a good book, and he is a good writer and storyteller. And James Comey comes across as a person of integrity, almost annoyingly so. I read this book quickly, and I would have posted this review/summary two days ago, but our internet went out. I was joking it was Russian hackers taking me down, but we realized it was actually my husband who hit the buried wire with a lawn aerator. Oops.

I recommend you read this book if you want to know how the FBI functions and its various investigations of the past several years. But I also understand why many people don’t want to buy or read this book for various reasons. For those people, I am going to give an extensive summary below. Consider this a spoiler alert.

I can break Comey’s book down into five major sections: 1) His early life 2) His early career including work under W. 3) His work with and thoughts on Obama 4) Hillary Clinton’s emails, and finally 5) His work with Trump. Seriously a third of this book is about Hillary Clinton’s emails!!

Also I want to reiterate this is not a political blog and though it is not hard to figure out where my ideologies lie, I tried to read this book objectively and summarize it as objectively as possible. I previously did the same with Fire and Fury.


Part 1: Early Life of James Comey

As I mentioned above, Comey starts his story at age 16 (1977) when he was held at gunpoint, at home with his brother. They thought they were going to die, and only were saved by the random appearance of a neighbor.

“My encounter with the Ramsey Rapist brought me years of pain. I thought about him every night for at least five years…and I slept with a knife at hand for far longer. I couldn’t see it at the time, but the terrifying experience was, in its own way, also an incredible gift. Believing–knowing in my mind–that I was going to die, and then surviving, made life seem like a precious, delicate miracle. As a high school senior, I started watching sunsets, looking at buds on trees, and noticing the beauty of our world. The feeling lasts to this day though sometimes it expresses itself in ways that might seem corny to people who fortunately never had the experience of measuring their time on this earth in seconds.”

Another main topic in this section is that he was bullied, after moving to the house mentioned above, but starting before that incident.

He also later found value in that experience, saying “Being picked on was very painful but in hindsight it made me a better judge of people…Surviving a bully requires constant learning and adaption.”

He admits that later, in college, he participated in bullying someone else, and this has stayed with him as regret. “Forty years later I am still ashamed of myself,” he wrote.

Another extremely personal moment of the book, and one that made me shed a tear is when he writes about how he and his wife lost an infant child to sepsis. They channeled this grief into a nationwide campaign to require a strep B bacteria test for mothers before they give birth.

Part 2: His early career

Comey has a law degree; he graduated from the University of Chicago law school in 1985. Much of his professional history I did not previously know. His first big job was working as a young prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office (Rudy Guiliani was head) when their top priority was organized crime, and Comey ended up prosecuting John Gambino of the most powerful Mafia crime family. He claims this case broke up the old Italian mafia in New York. It also gave him insight into how crime families operate as requiring loyalty, and that is a reference he comes back to in the book several times.

The next high profile case was when he prosecuted Martha Stewart for lying about benefiting from insider trading. (I had totally forgotten about this!). It seems he felt bad about having to prosecute her, but he had to because she lied.

“The Stewart experience reminded me that the justice system is an honor system. We really can’t always tell when people are lying or hiding documents, so when we are able to prove it, we simply must do so as a message to everyone. People must fear the consequences of lying in the justice system or the system can’t work.”

Comey then was hired as deputy attorney general under George W. Bush. John Ashcroft was the attorney general. Ashcroft gets very ill and Comey replays a dramatic scene of rushing to his hospital bed to assure the discontinuation of an illegal (in Comey’s opinion) surveillance program. He details fights with the W. administration over surveillance and torture, based on what he thought the law was, and both battles he lost. But despite these disagreements, he respected working with this administration compared to what he would witness later.

Part 3: Obama

It was surprising to Comey then (and even still) that he was picked as FBI Director under Obama. But Obama and Comey agreed that:

“The FBI should be independent and totally divorced from politics, which was what the ten-year term for a director was designed to ensure.”

“To be credible – both in reality and in perception – the FBI and its director cannot be close with the President”

This is a theme he comes back to many times in this book: That the FBI should be independent and non-political. He, as FBI director, should not be friends with the President or spend much time with him.

Comey says he didn’t necessarily support Obama before he was president but came to respect him due to his leadership and decision making and ability to actually listen. And his ability to laugh. He says Obama had enough confidence in himself to show humility. And sometimes he may have been overconfident.

Comey gives charming definitions of both listening and laughing (because laughing is acknowledging someone else is funny) in this book, both which he said Obama could do well.

Also in this section is detailed information on how the FBI works and what the day to day of a director’s life was. This was interesting.

Also know that Comey calls out himself several times in this book for what he feels were flaws, or mistakes. He also calls out the FBI for past mistakes. The FBI sent Martin Luther King Jr. a letter blackmailing him and suggesting he commit suicide! Comey included this information in a training course for FBI agents to learn from past mistakes. What he does not consider a mistake, however, is how he handled the “email” investigations, which leads me to the next section, a majority of the book…

Part 4: Hillary’s emails

I did certainly not expect that the largest part of this book would be about Hillary’s emails but it was. I will say I learned A LOT about the emails, more than I was ever able to put together from years of snippets on TV.

Points he made with detailed explanation:

  • The investigation whether to prosecute required them to answer two questions. 1) whether classified documents were moved or discussed outside of classified systems AND 2) what was she thinking when she mishandled the information, meaning did she have criminal intent to curtail the usual system of communication.
  • Levels of classified information range from “confidential” to “secret” to “top secret.”

For 1, the answer was yes, in fact 36 email chains discussed secret information and eight email chains discussed “top secret” information. They were all between people who had appropriate security clearances but still this was improper to discuss on an unclassified email system.

So the investigation focused on second question above: what was she thinking, was their criminal intent? Could they prove that she was doing something she knew she shouldn’t be doing? He maintains his staff looked through every email (even reconstructing the older, decommissioned server and on the laptops and interviews with staff members who sorted and deleted the “personal” emails) and did not find this.

For those who think she should have still been prosecuted under question 1, Comey says this is “absurd” considering standards set in the past. For example, General Petraeus, who actually took pictures of classified documents and provided them to his mistress who did not have security clearance, only got a $40K fine and probation for 2 years!

This above takes many pages, and THEN he has to go into the decision to reopen the investigation.

As we all remember, days before the election another laptop (Antony Weiner’s) was found with thousands of emails from Clinton’s private server. These emails were likely to be from the beginning of her tenure as Secretary of State and Comey says if any emails were likely to prove she knew operating out of the private server was wrong, this evidence would be found in these emails. He writes that his only choices were between “really bad” (for announcing the reopening the investigation at this time) or “catastrophic” for not announcing the re-opening and having it leaked closer to the election or even possibly after she was elected.

I still don’t understand how these emails were on this particular laptop, but I will say I understand after reading this why he made the decision he did. Of course then he announced again that nothing was found, and then we still ended up with…

5. Trump

Not until literally the last fourth of this book does Comey talk about Trump in detail at all. Before the inauguration, he had to brief Trump on the investigation into Russian interference and the dossier on allegations into the “peeing prostitutes.”

I felt the tone of the book changed at this point, and some of the details he included were a bit catty like mentioning Trump’s orange face, speculating that it was from a tanning bed with the glasses covering the white spots he noticed around his eyes, and his tie being too long, multiple times. One sentence said, “…and his tie too long, as usual” after he already mentioned the tie other times. I felt these moments took away from his more important criticisms of the president. He didn’t offer such physical reflections on the other subjects of the book, so this was a noticeable change; and it is an objective criticism I must give the book. I feel it took away from the more important things he was trying to say.

His more important criticisms, of course, included that Trump just didn’t get that the FBI director was supposed to be independent of the President, not friends, and not providing “loyalty.” During that first meeting, for example, Trump and his people discussed the “spin” in front of him.

“For my entire career, intelligence was a thing of mine and a political spin a thing of yours. Team Trump wanted to change that.”

Also the president was obsessed with denying the allegations about the Russian prostitutes…and who can blame him whether or not that is true…

I am going to be a bit unprofessional here to mention that the urinating prostitutes story was finally put in context here. I never understood why this would be attractive or requested by someone! But the allegation is that they were urinating “on each other on the very bed President Obama and the First Lady had once slept on in as a way of soiling the bed.” I really don’t want to believe this, but those were the rumors.

Also interesting to me was his impression of the President’s conversational habits.

“His method of speaking was like an oral jigsaw puzzle contest, with a shot clock. He would in rapid fire sequence, pick up a piece, put it down, pick up an unrelated piece, put it down, return to the original piece, on and on.”

No one could get a word in, he said. He thinks he does this to get everyone in the room to be a conspirator of the “facts” he was spinning. If you can never argue or say anything, it is like agreeing.

Comey also noted he has never seen Trump laugh, ever. This is interesting to me, and I haven’t seen this either. Not a real laugh.

Closing the book, of course, is commentary on how Trump wanted him to close the “cloud” of the Russian investigation and he could not do so. He later learned he was fired on TV while in California, working.

There is much, much more here in this section and elsewhere in the book, but I am staring to feel I can’t summarize it all and do it justice, especially objectively without adding my own commentary (hard for me!!)). If these items are of interest to you, I do suggest you read this book! There is so much more than I can summarize here.

All in all he makes a good case for his own ethics and against those of the current president, in an interesting book.

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