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.

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