.jpg)
The fired FBI director gives an incredibly personal and critical account of the president, including the size of his hands and his panicked reaction to the dossier that claimed there existed a video depicting him engaging in lewd behaviour with sex workers.
The book was intended to be released next week. But with parts of it leaking over the last few hours, its contents are now becoming public – and the world is finally learning deep secrets about two of the most powerful people in the world.
It's inauguration day!
Comey says he didn't want to go along, initially. But everyone told him it would look bad if he didn't – and, anyway, he could just record the American football games he was so excited for and watch them after. So he went along after all, and just committed to keep "a health distance from Trump. So I figured out which way the president would likely enter the room and mingled my way to the opposite end [...] I couldn't get farther away without climbing out of the window, an option that would begin to look more appealing as time went by". Comey seems like an awkward man.
But it worked, at least initially. Comey says that he'd accidentally stood next to a blue curtain, wearing a blue suit, and so had blended in. "I literally clung to the blue curtain, all in the hope that I could avoid an ill-advised and totally awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States". Yes – he's definitely a very awkward man!
Anyway, Trump spotted him. He called him over. And we are given our second detailed depiction of just how terrible it sounds to hug James Comey:
The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn't. I thwarted the hug, but I got something in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. 'I'm really looking forward to working with you,' he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The world whole 'saw' Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn't get any worse.
If I've learnt one thing from this book so far, it is this: do not try and hug James Comey.
Then the dossier leaked, and with it the accusation of the tape. Trump publicly attacked the publication, and held a press conference; privately, he rang Comey and said that he didn't even stay in Moscow. Plus, he says:
"Another reason you know this isn't true: I'm a germaphobe. There's no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way."
Comey goes on to give his response to this. And it's a little strange itself, really:
I actually let out an audible laugh. I decided not to tell him the activity alleged did not seem to require either an overnight stay or even being in close proximity to the participants. In fact, though I didn't know for sure, I imagined the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow was large enough for a germaphobe to be at safe distance from the activity. I thought all of this and said none of it.
After that meeting was over, Comey asked if he could have some time in a smaller group. Trump said that they could talk one-on-one. And we're into...
"The Pee Tape."
Comey doesn't call it that, obviously. He says that he explained the Steele dossier in broad terms and then moved onto discussing "the allegation in the dossier that he had been with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013 and that the Russians had filmed the episode. I didn't mention one particular allegation in the dossier – that he was having prostitutes urinate on each other on the very bed President Obama and the First Lady had once slept in as a way of soiling the bed. I figured that single detail was not necessary to put him on notice about the material".
Comey says Trump was really interested in this one bit of the tape. (Obviously he's not alone in that...) He kept insisting it wasn't true; Comey kept saying that he was merely making him aware of the contents of the tape, and informing him since part of the FBI's job was to keep him safe from coercion.
After that, he kept talking about cases of women who had accused him of sexual assault, Comey claims. He became more defensive, Comey says.
And then he used his Trump card, and told the president that the FBI wasn't investigating him. They shook hands and left.
Comey is chewing over what he thinks he did in the email case. He says that he didn't mean to be influenced by his belief that Clinton would won, but accepts that might have happened unconsciously; he'd be very upset to think he had any impact on the result, because he has spent his life working for institutions he believed to be apolitical. But he pays attention to the criticism, so long as it is "thoughtful" or convincing in its "logic or factual presentation.
The stuff that gets me most is the claim that I am in love with my own righteousness, my own virtue. I have long worried about my ego. I am proud of the fact that I try to do the right thing. I am proud of the fact that I try to be truthful and transparent. I do think my way is better than that of the lying partisans who crowd our public life today. But there is danger that all that pride can make me blind and closed off to other views of what the right thing is.
This passage – contained within an explanation of his decisions that is in itself contained about halfway through the book – probably explains a whole lot of it, and of what he did.
[A little intervention from me. Comey's style is a little strange, as evidenced in bits like that. Sometimes he sounds a little like he's writing a police report; others he sounds like a particularly idealistic politician, talking about principles so abstract they're almost meaningless. It's all very well put together, but sometimes a little strange and so far it's hard to see if he feels like he's just narrating, or making excuses, or putting together a guide or manifesto about morality.] Comey is describing the attacks he got in the media and from Clinton supporters for that disclosure. And then one gesture of kindness, which he describes at slightly strange length – and which came from Loretta Lynch, who was then Attorney General. It's worth quoting in full:
I walked into the room first. I turned and waited as the attorney general closed the door. She then turned, lowered her head, and walked toward me with arms out wide. This was awkward in a number of respects. Perhaps mostly because I am about eighteen inches taller than Loretta Lynch. When our bodies came together, her face went into my solar plexus as she wrapped her arms around me. I reached down and press both forearms, also awkwardly, against her back.'I thought you needed a hug,' she said as we separated. She was probably right. Although I'm not a hugger by nature, I felt physically beaten after the last few days. I also probably looked that way.
Once that had all happened, he writes that he was faced with two choices. He could tell people the investigation had begun – into a candidate who would be fighting an election in a few weeks – or not. As we know now, he decided to speak out – but it's a lot less clear why he did, given it might have knocked Clinton's campaign in such a way that she lost the election.
He said he saw the two options as "speak" and "conceal". He didn't want to conceal – something that would be misleading because he'd told the public the investigation was over. So he decided to speak.
(Here I'm going to butt in: doesn't the FBI conceal all sorts of stuff, all the time? He wasn't even actively concealing anything – just making a decision not to unconceal it. But hey ho – I'm not the FBI director, I'm just your humble book reader. Make your own mind up as we go.)
We're into the first of what Comey's critics would say was his big mistakes: the decision to announce right before the election that something more had happened with Hillary Clinton's emails. Here's how he tells it:
Someone mentioned in passing that Anthony Weiner had a laptop that might have something to do with Clinton's emails. He doesn't remember the conversation because such a suggestion didn't make sense. Soon after he was asked for a meeting with his team, who told him that actually there were hundreds of thousands of emails from Clinton's personal domain. It had messages they had been looking for for years – early messages that had since been deleted, and which could possibly contain some confirmation she'd been told not to use her own server, or something else incriminating. His team asked for a warrant, he said yes – and one of the most important parts of Comey's life and the US election began.
Why didn't Comey say that he and the rest of the establishment suspected the Russians were up to something? Doing so would help "inoculate" the public, he admits.
But it would also help do the job of number one, below – helping to undermine the election before it had even happened.
Obama thought the same, and resisted the idea. His team thought Trump wasn't going to win – Obama himself said that Putin had "backed the wrong horse", says Comey – and so there wasn't any point.
(Later on, the administration did say something. But the FBI's name wasn't on it – because "adding the FBI's name would change nothing and be inconsistent with the way we hoped to operate on the eve of an election", says Comey.
Next chapter, and into the other great refrain of this book and of life:
The Russians.
The Clinton email case wasn't actually Comey's big concern during this summer 2016, he says – it was actually trying to understand "what the Russians were up to". The intelligence community thought they were trying to influence the election, and they were busy attempting to work out how. In three ways, they reckoned:
- Undermining confidence in America and its election process, so that it wouldn't be an inspiration to the rest of the world.
- Hurt Hillary Clinton, maybe for personal reasons. Putin didn't like her because he blamed her for demonstrations in Moscow in December 2011. He thought he'd been personally attacked.
- "Help Donald Trump win". Comey suggests that they like him because he "had been saying favourable things about the Russian government and Putin had shown a long-standing appreciation for business leaders who cut deals rather than stand on principle".
Heading straight into our first mention of Trump. It comes on page 187 – and can you guess what it's about? It's about:
Emails. (I reckon I'm going to be writing that a word a lot.)
Trump hasn't actually arrived in the story yet. He just appears in a flash-forward: Comey is actually talking about the decision to announce that it wasn't recommending charges over the handling of Clinton's emails. But, he notes, Donald Trump would later suggest that he had "saved her" by holding this press conference.
He says he didn't mean to do that. Nor did he mean to "save him" with the announcements on emails that would come later. We get a peek at some of the kind of ethical principles that Comey is going to be leaning a lot in this book, I think: "The goal was to tell the truth and demonstrate what higher loyalty – to the institutions of justice – looks like".
He concludes this chapter with a note that makes it sound like Comey is as weary of hearing the words "her emails" as we are.
"We had tasted the poison of our political system, and I had taken all the hits I anticipated, but I also felt great relief because the FBI and I were finished with Hillary Clinton and her emails.
"If only."
Just some notes before we start: I'm going to focus, here, on the Trump bits. If that's all done quickly then we'll head into some of the other stuff.
This isn't only a book about Trump, though. Far from it. Comey discusses his early life, his work for previous presidents Clinton and Obama, and his personal philosophy about leadership and ethics.
But that's not what anyone's here for. Let's read about Trump's reaction to the "pee tape" – and more!
This is the second time that we've live blogged the release of an explosive Trump book, by the way. I've a feeling, the way the White House is going, that it won't be the last either.
This time is much the same: explosive, long-awaited book, filled with shocking claims; an angry and critical reaction from Donald Trump.
Now let's see if it's got some of the same bizarre intrigue!
Ready? We're going to dive in!
Please allow a moment for the live blog to load
