Whether or not the FBI Director James Comey would speak publicly about the Hillary Clinton email server investigation had been a matter of debate throughout the spring on the seventh floor corridor that denotes the executive offices inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, according to those close to the FBI director.
During the winter, as the long-running investigation unfolded, the FBI did not expect to make any sort of public statement regarding its investigatory conclusions. That role historically has fallen to the Justice Department; the FBI rarely—if ever—makes public remarks regarding prosecutorial recommendations. But even weeks before Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s ill-conceived and seemingly compromising tarmac run-in with former President Bill Clinton in June, Comey and his leadership team had come to understand that the public credibility of the century-old law enforcement agency would hinge on its handling of the politically touchy email investigation.
The decision to hold Monday’s press conference came after Bureau leaders decided that the FBI couldn’t simply conduct its investigation behind closed doors and then kick the decision across Pennsylvania Avenue to what’s known as “Main Justice.” Instead, to defend the FBI’s independence and future credibility and avoid the perception that its investigation had been politically influenced, he had to publicly account for its own work.
It wasn’t that Comey, a lanky and low-ley Republican career prosecutor who served as deputy attorney general under George W. Bush, thought that he could avoid blowback altogether. When he stepped up to the lectern at the Hoover Building on Monday, the FBI director knew that no matter what the investigation uncovered, one party or the other would be angry, arguing that the FBI had compromised its independence and integrity in pursuit of a political agenda. But he also knew the best way to avoid maximum blowback was transparency. And so, his only mission was to provide as complete an accounting as possible. As he said before reporters in his 15-minute remarks, “In this case, given the importance of the matter, I think unusual transparency is in order.”
In fact, the whole scene—the unprecedented nature of the speech, its unflinching criticism of Clinton, and its determination to protect the honor of the bureau—was very characteristic of the man who’s been the FBI’s director for the past three years.
While discussing the possibility of holding such an unprecedented public accounting, the only real model for the press conference bureau leaders could find was the 2009 announcement by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to pursue charges against vice presidential aide Scooter Libby for obstructing and lying to agents investigating the leaking the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame. In that moment, Fitzgerald held forth at length about the investigation and the decision to bring charges against Libby, while not prosecuting the underlying leak itself. In that moment Fitzgerald staked his own reputation on the case—and it would prove a familiar model for Comey. The two prosecutors know each well: Fitzgerald and Comey came of age together, part of a tightly knit group of rising Justice stars and U.S. attorneys forged by the crucible of being inside government in the wake of 9/11, and both men were considered for the job Comey now holds.
Comey saw such a Fitzgerald-like performance as the FBI’s best tool to diffuse a political hot potato; the director had repeatedly pledged over the winter and spring that no outside pressure would sway investigators, a fact he also emphasized during Monday’s remarks. “Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way. I couldn’t be prouder to be part of this organization,” he said.
His extended comments were a gamble: He understood that if he backed the FBI’s investigation forcefully with his own reputation, he could likely blunt harm to the bureau’s long-standing stature as an apolitical investigator, able to hold public officials to account. No less a Clinton critic than Rush Limbaugh had praised him in April, saying that Comey “really is a guy with impeccable integrity, especially measured against most people in Washington.” Bill O’Reilly had similarly said he trusts Comey too, and Geraldo Rivera went even a step farther, saying, “no doubt that James Comey is the straightest shooter in Washington, D.C.”
In crafting his remarks Monday—he prides himself on memorizing important speeches and spoke directly to the cameras through much of his prepared remarks—Comey understood that he also had to address internal fears within the bureau that the agency was giving a pass to someone who broke the law.
To that effect, given that he might end up serving under President Hillary Clinton come January, Comey’s criticism of her actions and her State Department’s culture was bracing and unflinching, especially by the standards of bureaucratic gobbledygook in Washington. It’s clear that the email server and the “extremely careless” behavior by Clinton’s team surprised and disgusted him. “Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation,” he said. But, as he emphasized throughout his remarks, stupid and arrogant behavior doesn’t necessarily rise to a criminal offense, and while rules were clearly broken, the actions of Team Clinton weren’t prosecutable beyond a reasonable doubt.
As dramatic as the press conference was on Monday—the entire political establishment held its breath awaiting his conclusion—Comey’s well used to pressure, and he’s dealt with far more complicated situations than a merely politically-charged turn before the TV cameras. In fact, his Monday press conference, announcing a decision that had far-reaching implications for the U.S. presidential election, both major political parties and the world at large—a press conference all-but unprecedented in U.S. government and politics, and one that could have defined his tenure as FBI director—might have only ranked as the third-most dramatic moment in James Comey’s 55-year-long life: He was as a child held hostage, along with his brother and other neighbors, at gunpoint by a man who broke into his parents’ home; and during his most recent previous stint in government, he faced down the president of the United States over what he argued was an unconstitutional domestic spying program and forced George W. Bush to blink.
Comey’s up-front comment, “They do not know what I am about to say,” about whether he had communicated with the Department of Justice or any other government office before making his statement, could be said to characterize the former prosecutor’s entire career in government. Comey’s bosses have rarely known what Comey might say—and, paradoxically, it was that forceful independence that helped him land his dream job of FBI director. Comey, indeed, has built his career on an uncompromising personal credibility and unerring moral compass—in a way that perhaps no other recent high-level government official has. The philosophical religion major at William & Mary rose rapidly through the ranks of the Department of Justice to become the prestigious U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the wake of 9/11, where he helped prosecute Martha Stewart, and ultimately became deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft.
It was there where Comey led an unprecedented revolt inside the Bush administration in March 2004 against what he—and others he recruited to his cause—saw as illegal and unconstitutional surveillance programs being used by the NSA since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, a program known by the codename STELLAR WIND. Over the course of several weeks in February and March 2004, Comey fought hard against then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, Chief of Staff Andrew Card and Vice President Dick Cheney, among others.
A savvy and adept political player, Comey enlisted during the STELLAR WIND showdown the help of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, understanding that whereas a White House could easily withstand the resignation of its deputy attorney general, no president could successfully weather the loss of an FBI director. Indeed, it was, according to many close to the STELLAR WIND showdown, the knowledge that Mueller stood ready to resign over the surveillance excesses that awoke President Bush to the showdown brewing inside the Department of Justice and White House.
At one point, during the crisis’s pivotal moment at George Washington University Hospital, where a sick and weakened Attorney General John Ashcroft was being pressured to sign off on the STELLAR WIND program from his hospital bed, FBI Director Robert Mueller instructed Ashcroft’s security detail, composed of FBI agents, to resist with force if necessary, if Card or Gonzales tried to use their own protective detail of Secret Service agents to remove Comey from Ashcroft’s presence.
As dramatic and surreal as that midnight showdown was, the entire event played out without any public note at the time, and only came to light when Comey first spoke of it during a congressional hearing after he left government for the private sector. During a closed door speech to the National Security Agency months after the showdown, he told agency staffers, “We know that our actions, and those of the agencies we support, will be held up in a quiet, dignified, well-lit room, where they can be viewed with the perfect, and brutally unfair, vision of hindsight. We know they will be reviewed in hearing rooms or courtrooms where it is impossible to capture even a piece of the urgency and exigency felt during a crisis,” adding that such pressure made reasoned thinking all the more necessary: “‘No’ must be spoken into a storm of crisis.”
It was his independence and moral compass—and his traditional Republican affiliation—that helped land him President Barack Obama’s nomination to be FBI director in 2013 as Mueller left office.
Now just three years into a fixed 10-year term, Comey could presumably serve through nearly an entire two terms working for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump—both of whose political futures he radically altered with his 15-minute remarks. But such outspokenness isn’t unusual for him: His short tenure at the bureau has been marked repeatedly by his decision to step forcefully into evolving public debates.
In a capital that often seems sharply divided politically, Comey has carved his own path—a Republican serving a Democratic president, not afraid to go beyond the White House’s talking points and provoke rebukes for his own freelancing on criminal justice debates, as he has by repeatedly speaking out about a so-called “Ferguson effect” that he says is chilling policing nationwide. He’s also jealously guarded the FBI’s political independence and warned agents about venturing beyond the boundaries of proper law enforcement: One of his first changes to the FBI’s training regimen was to require agents-in-training to tour the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, and be schooled in the Bureau’s Hoover-era abuses of power that included attempting to blackmail the civil rights leader.
Yet the man who led the STELLAR WIND showdown, to bring the government’s surveillance programs within constitutional bounds, hasn’t been shy about seeking sweeping new lawful surveillance powers, enabling new surveillance technologies like facial recognition, and provoking a high-profile fight with Apple Computer and CEO Tim Cook over Silicon Valley’s increasingly reliance on encryption tools.
Indeed, his comments on Monday—while recommending that former Clinton face no criminal charges for her private email servers—left plenty of criticism for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for her opponents to use in attack ads, including that foreign governments or other hostile actors possibly gained access to her emails. “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” he said. “While not the focus of our investigation, we also developed evidence that the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified e-mail systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.”
If you live in a battleground state, prepare to see Comey’s face appear regularly in political ads airing in the months ahead. But, to Comey, that will be a small price to pay to ensure that, as best as possible Monday, he defended the FBI’s honor—and his own credibility.