We still need James Comey
By the time he was fired Tuesday, James Comey was not a popular man. But it is not an accident that many people have quickly gone from braying for his blood to fretting about how our country will get along without him: Who will lead the FBI? Who will stand up to President Donald Trump? Whom can we count on to tell us the truth, without fear or favor, about the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia?
The reason for the sudden shift is not just horror at Trump’s behavior, though the thuggishness of the firing and its seeming connection to the Russia matter are horrifying. The other reason has to do with Comey himself, specifically with three characteristics that made him a most unusual figure in Washington. Put simply, we’re scared about losing — and we are already missing — the very things we hate about him.
Full disclosure: James Comey is a friend. I won’t pretend to neutrality about him. He is a highly honorable and decent person, and I have no doubt that he made the many judgments for which people loathe him in good faith. My purpose here is not to relitigate the merits of his handling of the Clinton email investigation or any other controversial judgment.
My purpose is, rather, to identify some salient attributes of the man that both infuriate people and simultaneously make his abrupt removal so scary.
First, Comey is without subtext. He’s the only truly subtextless man I’ve met working in senior levels of government in Washington. If you want to know why he’s doing something, you just ask him — in an open congressional hearing, in a news conference, in the Q&A at a speech at a college. If it’s appropriate to talk about it, he’ll tell you. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t answer cagily. And, remarkably for a Washington figure, he explains his thinking. He answers questions about it. He releases documents.
When someone behaves this way in the run-up to a presidential election on a politically sensitive matter, like Hillary Clinton’s private email server, in a fashion that departs from normal Justice Department policy, it drives people crazy for good reason. But this is the same attribute on which those of us concerned about the Russia connections have been counting. We want an investigation that’s going to give us answers and that’s going to show its work. We want progress reports and details, and we want them sooner rather than later. In the world of Trump, we really want people who aren’t going to lie. We want people who can sit in front of a congressional committee for hours and, however mad they may make us, never give us reason to doubt that they are telling the truth as they see it.
Second, Comey has an unfailing instinct to fall on every grenade. This is a highly unusual trait in Washington, a town where lots of people dodge responsibility for everything. Bill Clinton has a private meeting on a plane with the attorney general? Comey will step up to conclude and disclose the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. New information comes to light right before an election? Comey will take the heat for informing Congress.
Trump feared him for his honesty and integrity
Some people may frame this instinct negatively, as showboating or preening or overstepping. Others may frame it positively, as taking responsibility. But it’s clearly a rare instinct in Washington. When one person has an instinct to fall on grenades and everyone else has an instinct to flee from them, it’s not surprising when that one person ends up dealing with all the explosives.
Here’s the problem: When you remove that person, who is left to take responsibility? It’s certainly not Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general (and the new head of the Russia investigation), who recommended Comey’s firing. Without Comey, Washington is sorely lacking a person willing to ensure that the Russia matter is investigated properly, that the FBI is protected from politics and that if political appointees in the Justice Department pass the buck, there’s at least someone who will not. Comey may have had a tendency to lurch for the buck across the table, but his departure leaves us with leadership that will do anything to avoid handling it.
Third, Comey is genuinely fixated on independence and doing the right thing. In 2004, when he was deputy attorney general, he stood up to President George W. Bush over the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program. He stood up to Hillary Clinton, too, when he rekindled an investigation of her, even though everyone expected her to be elected president a few weeks later and thus be in a position to fire him. He has stood up to Trump.
Comey is often criticized for an obsession with his own rectitude. And it’s certainly true that when a damn-the-torpedoes decision backfires, the result is explosive. That’s what happened last year when Comey made a judgment about how to proceed in the Clinton email affair — and then Trump unexpectedly won. It understandably makes people angry when Comey responds, as he recently did in congressional testimony, that he doesn’t think considering the political consequences of his action would have been proper and that even knowing what he now knows, he would act the same way again.
But that same insistence on standing up to power and doing what is right irrespective of consequences is the main thing since Jan. 20 that has stood between Trump and impunity. Whatever you think of Comey’s judgment, he will do what he believes to be right, whomever it might help or hurt politically and whatever damage it might do to him and his reputation. Who else can you say that about?
This constellation of human traits has virtues and vices, and the two are intertwined. But I do think we’re going to miss those very features of Comey that so many Americans have come to hate over the past year. And it is, I believe, those very features that led Trump to fire the FBI director.
Because at the end of the day, Americans need someone to count on to tell the truth (even if a bit too much of it and at the wrong moment), who will take responsibility as others duck it (even if that sometimes looks self-centered and preening) and who will do the right thing as he sees it whatever the cost (even if the cost to himself and the country is terrible). If you’re Trump, there’s nothing scarier than such a person. Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the editor-in-chief of Lawfare.