Comey’s critical memoir fails to land its punches
For the second time this year, a book from behind the scenes of the Trump White House has burst on to the non-fiction bestseller lists.
First there was Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, and now readers get A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Loyalty
by former FBI director James Comey.
Comey’s firing by Donald Trump in May helped to launch the US Department of Justice investigation led by Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election – an investigation the FBI first began under Comey’s direction.
A Higher Loyalty is technically a memoir but it is unlikely readers will care about the details of his upbringing and personal life, nor about his departmental work.
This is almost exclusively a Trump government exposé and, unlike Wolff’s book, is written by a former member of the administration.
A former FBI director writing a tell-all about a sitting president is a serious thing … or at least it should be.
But beneath its pseudo-literarW veneer, there are many“novelistic” touches. A Higher Loyalty reads like a gossipy tattle piece, essentially
Fire and Fury 2: This Time it’s Personal.
Comey has serious criticism for Mr Trump. He says he is “unethical and untethered to truth and institutional values”, that his leadership is “transactional, ego-driven and about personal loyalty” and, in what is sure to be the book’s main talking point, that he runs his White House like a Mafia boss.
It is an atmosphere familiar to Comey from his years of prosecuting the Gambino crime family.
“The boss is in complete control,” he says. “The loyalty oaths, the us-versus-them worldview, the lying about all things in service to some code of loyalty that put the organisation above morality and above the truth.”
Comey’s portrait is one of a megalomaniacal narcissist, someone drastically unfit for office and a serious danger to the country.
The whole account should be uniquely damning but two things stop it from being that.
The first is minor, but screamingly hypocritical. Sprinkled throughout the book is exactly the kind of schoolyard mockery for which Mr Trump has been rightly condemned.
But much worse is the most stunning revelation – about Comey, not Mr Trump. Two weeks before the election in 2016, Comey announced to Congress that the FBI had reopened its investigation into the private email server Hillary Clinton had used as US secretary of state. Mrs Clinton’s standing plummeted.
More than any other single person, James Comey is responsible for President Donald Trump.
Comey admits that his actions in 2016 were politically motivated. His torturous logic? He was certain Mrs Clinton would win the election and did not want her presidency tainted by the revelation that he had kept quiet about the investigation.
The chance that his announcement would wreck Mrs Clinton’s campaign never occurred to him.
And the question of what the FBI director was doing meddling in a presidential election for any reason is never addressed.
It ultimately sinks the book. Readers will be left with the deeply ironic impression that Comey is actually very like Mr Trump. His higher loyalty is reserved mainly for himself.