Publisher Description
On May 9, 2017, James Comey, was in Los Angeles on official business when he learned from a television broadcast that U.S. President Donald J. Trump had sent a terse letter informing him of his termination in a manila envelope by courier to the FBI headquarters in Washington. That action was closely followed by the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and “any other actions” that may be uncovered. These matters and their many offspring have dominated the public conversation ever since. While Mr. Comey was no doubt shocked, it is doubtful that he was very surprised, given the testy nature of his relationship with Mr. Trump during their brief working relationship. On May 16, a week after the firing, we learned that Comey had documented every meeting and telephone call he had with the President in a series of detailed memos. In his testimony to the Congress in June, he said he had done so to create a “paper trail” to record “what he saw as the president’s improper effort to influence a continuing investigation” and because he “was honestly concerned he (Trump) might lie” about them. There are seven memos in all, written over a period of about three and a half months and released to the public on April 19, 2018. They are read here in entirety. While many of us are familiar with some statements and events reported by the news media, it is enlightening and instructive to hear them in full.
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About James Comey
James Comey is a former US civil servant and author whose first book, the #1 New York Times bestseller A Higher Loyalty, was made into a Showtime limited series, “The Comey Rule.” He had served as the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2013 until May 9, 2017, when he was fired by Donald Trump.
A Yonkers, New York native, he attended the College of William and Mary and the University of Chicago Law School and then returned to New York and joined the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as an assistant US attorney. There, he took on numerous crimes, most notably organized crime in the case of the United States v. John Gambino, et al. He then became an assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, where he handled the high-profile case that followed the 1996 terrorist attack on the US military’s Khobar Towers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia.
He returned to New York after 9/11 to become the US attorney for the Southern District of New York. At the end of 2003, he was tapped to be deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice under then Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Comey left the Department of Justice in 2005 to serve as General Counsel and Senior Vice President at defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Five years later, he joined Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment fund, as its general counsel. In early 2013,he became a lecturer in law, a senior research scholar, and Hertog Fellow in National Security Law at Columbia Law School.
After he was fired as FBI Director, he held the King Lecture Chair in Public Policy at Howard University for 2017-18 and served as a distinguished lecturer in public policy at the College of William and Mary for 2018-2019. In September 2020, his first book, A Higher Loyalty, was made into a Showtime limited series, “The Comey Rule.”