Comey’s ‘go-it-alone approach’ may have tarnished bureau
WASHINGTON: As deputy attorney-general during the George W Bush administration, James B Comey clashed repeatedly with the White House over its interrogation and warrantless wiretapping programmes, earning a reputation of fighting for his view of what was right no matter whom he angered.
That same impulse — that he knew best, no matter the consequences — underpinned Mr Comey’s decisions in 2016 to flout Justice Department norms and update the public on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information. Democrats have said he cost her the presidential election.
Mr Comey was faulted for those decisions in a highly critical Justice Department report released on Thursday about the FBI’s handling of the Clinton inquiry. By trying to protect the bureau, the department’s inspector-general found, Mr Comey instead damaged the FBI’s reputation.
“Comey chose to deviate from the FBI’s and the department’s established procedures and norms and instead engaged in his own subjective, ad hoc decision making,” the report said. It added, “The decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”
An official condemnation of Mr Comey’s go-it-alone approach, the report is bound to shape his legacy, providing grist for both Republicans and Democrats as well as FBI agents who disagreed with how he ran the bureau at a politically perilous time.
Mr Comey defended his decisions and said the inspector-general, Michael E Horowitz, had the benefit of hindsight. While Mr Comey supported the review, he disagreed with its conclusions.
“If a future FBI leadership team ever
faces a similar situation — something I pray never happens — it will have the benefit of this important document,” he wrote in The New York Times.
Fired abruptly by President Donald Trump last year as the Russia investigation engulfed the young Trump administration, Mr Comey has returned to the public spotlight, chastening the president on Twitter and writing a best-seller. Whether he has a third act in another administration or as a publicly elected official is an open question.
In his tour as FBI director, Mr Comey ultimately served as a major figure in the 2016 election, possibly shaping its outcome even as he sought to navigate the bureau away from the bitter political atmosphere of the campaign.
Mr Horowitz determined that Mr Comey should not have announced unilaterally in July of that year that he would not recommend charges against Ms Clinton, and he should not have called her “extremely careless” during a highly unusual news conference.
Mr Comey was insubordinate, the inspector-general said, and should have followed the chain of command and coordinated with his Justice Department bosses in holding a news conference. Mr Comey told Attorney-General Loretta E Lynch that he intended to make an announcement regarding the investigation but provided no details.
Mr Comey also should not have sent a pair of letters to Congress just days before the election saying the FBI had reopened the investigation, the inspector-general said.
The former director’s supreme confidence has exposed the FBI to accusations of political bias and corruption, according to former and current agents, who predicted the FBI would need years to regain the public’s trust. “For Comey, this is a stain that will not come out,” said Tim Weiner, author of Enemies: A History of the FBI.
Mr Comey concedes he might have done “some things differently”. In his bestselling book published this spring, A Higher Loyalty, Mr Comey wrote that perhaps he could have found a better way to describe Ms Clinton’s conduct but spent little time second-guessing himself.