The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Comey talks Trump, ethics at UConn
STORRS — Former FBI Director James Comey, greeted like a conquering hero on the University of Connecticut campus Monday night, said that when President Donald Trump fired him last year, he felt as if he had been pushed off a speeding train.
But after the shock of watching the TV announcement in the Los Angeles bureau of the FBI, and flying back east in an agency airplane — sipping wine from a paper cup — Comey said his saving grace was a set of core values.
He warned that Trump is a threat, a “forest fire” which, fortunately, is sowing seeds for the future in the scorched earth.
“I already see growth in this country,” Comey, 57, said, detailing the increasing interest in public policy, from young people to veterans. But he warned that most Americans are still not engaged.
“This isn’t about taxes, or immigration, it’s about the values of the United States,” he said.
During a sometimes humorous half-hour monologue, then a 45-minute conversation with UConn President Susan Herbst before more than 2,000 students, faculty and guests in the Jorgensen Auditorium, Comey — at 6 feet 8 inches a self-described “giraffe”— warned that unfulfilled potential is a trap for many people, but true leaders help others realize their best.
The privately funded annual Edmund Fusco Contemporary Issues Forum paid Comey, who teaches this year at his alma mater, the College of William and Mary, $100,000 for the appearance.
Comey said Trump was different in one important way from the two other presidents for whom he worked: George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“I have never seen President Trump laugh,” said Comey, a former Westport resident and lead attorney for the Bridgewater hedge fund there. “Laughter requires a balance of confidence and humility. It requires an admission. The insecure can’t do it.”
Comey’s best-selling memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” which blew the lid off his relationship with Trump, put Comey in a new place.
“I never wanted to be an unemployed celebrity,” he quipped.
He saved his animus for the national gun debate, which he said is being used as a political tool. He recalled living in Connecticut at the time of the Sandy Hook School massacre.
“Ethical leadership isn’t about decisions,” Comey said. “It’s about the way we make decisions.”
A few days after he was terminated in May 2017, he said he realized that in the future he had to help make good to follow bad. He boils down ethical leadership to four traits: “kind and tough, confident and humble.”
Visiting the Los Angeles field office minutes before he watched his own firing on live on TV, Comey said at that moment he felt “tremendous job security.” The audience laughed. “I know it sounds nuts.”
Comey said Trump tried to pull him closer, but he pushed away.
“We need to be in the executive branch, but never entirely of the executive branch,” he said, harkening back to the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. When Trump had him for dinner in the White House and asked for his personal support, “It was clear to me that he didn’t know anything about loyalty.”