San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Comey has more to say about American justice
Former FBI director’s second book takes aim at Trump’s attack on the legal system
James Comey found a second career as a public intellectual not long after he was fired by President Donald Trump from his role as FBI director. Comey’s book “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership” was appointment reading in Washington: an insider’s chronicle of how the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation and the first few uneasy months of the Trump presidency. Now, Comey is back with his follow-up volume, “Saving Justice,” which shares many of his first book’s themes — and limitations.
“Saving Justice” was published just a week before Joe Biden’s inauguration, and Comey explicitly frames the book as part of a larger project of rebuilding American institutions in Trump’s wake. Whereas “A Higher Loyalty” was fashioned as a memoir, “Saving Justice” is more of a user’s manual for the justice system, whose independence and integrity Trump has done his best to undermine. It’s both an exploration of the values Trump has tried to pervert and an explanation of why those values matter.
Trump’s desire to use the Justice Department as a political cudgel — his efforts to rig the system in favor of political allies like Roger Stone, his push to prosecute Hillary Clinton and Comey himself — has been a defining feature of his presidency. But for laypeople not familiar with the history and culture of the department, it’s far easier to stumble across pundits decrying Trump’s attacks on law enforcement independence than it is to find a cogent explanation of why that independence is important in the first place.
“Saving Justice” aims to provide that explanation, and Comey writes from a place of deep sincerity about the moral code that Justice Department employees must follow as people who are above politics and doing their best “to find and tell the American people the truth.” He wrote the book, he says, “for ordinary citizens, not legal experts or historians, because all of us must know the Justice Department.”
There’s more than an echo here of former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara’s similarly titled book, “Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law,” which also seeks to explain the ins and outs of the justice system to a lay audience. While Bharara can be arch, Comey sticks to his wholesome Boy Scout persona. But each uses anecdotes from his career in the Justice Department — and in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which both men led — to illuminate different aspects of the workings of justice. Comey fleshes out his book with stories from his work prosecuting mob and narcotics cases, though he’s more enthusiastic about the former than the latter, and tells a few yarns from his time as FBI director as well.
As with “A Higher Loyalty,” Trump casts a shadow over “Saving Justice” well before he makes an appearance. When the narrative moves toward Comey’s later career and his eventual confrontation with the president, the book starts to speed up and turn into a supercut of the most memorable moments from “A Higher Loyalty.” (Remember Comey’s uneasy dinner with Trump? The president’s request that he drop the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn?) This gravitational pull toward Trump is probably inevitable. But Comey’s focus on Trump prevents him from examining the wider problems that led to public distrust in the justice system well before the current president entered the political scene.
The most glaring example is the book’s handling of race. While working as a prosecutor in Richmond, for example, Comey helped build a program that aimed to reduce gun crime by threatening defendants with federal prosecution — an intimidating prospect because of the likelihood of longer sentences and incarceration away from family.
The program, known as Project Exile, was hailed as a great success in reducing crime in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and Comey writes proudly in “Saving Justice” about his work on the matter — describing the program as “an aggressive effort to use federal gun prosecutions ... to drive down gun violence.” But it’s hard to read this passage in 2021, in the midst of a movement to reform the criminal justice system, and not think about the mass incarceration of Black men — many of whom are serving lengthy sentences because of the same regime of mandatory minimum sentencing that Project Exile relied on. What’s more, recent research suggests that the project may not have had much effect in cutting crime.
Comey writes about the importance of working with Richmond’s Black community to build support for Project Exile, and elsewhere in “Saving Justice” he notes the FBI’S need to move past its history of racial terror and the importance of recruiting more agents of color. But his failure to address critiques of Project Exile reads strangely alongside his insistence that “effective law enforcement depends on public trust. And that trust depends on transparency.” Trump has done his best to undermine trust in the justice system among people who have little interaction with it, but there are other people — many Black or Latino — who distrust the system because they have seen too much of it.
Comey’s public presence since his firing has made him one of the most high-profile prosecutor-pundits of the Trump era — a class of former Justice Department officials who have taken to the airwaves and editorial pages to respond to the president’s abuses. Seen in a certain light, “Saving Justice” is an argument for the continued moral relevance of law enforcement expertise as a guide in stitching institutions back together under the Biden presidency. Yet the inequities of the criminal justice system as it now exists, as opposed to the highminded ideals that Comey treasures, make this a harder sell in the absence of sustained reflection on the system’s failures. Trump has done real harm to the independence of the justice system, and Comey’s project of civic education addresses a genuine problem. But whether former law enforcement officials should lead that project is a different question.
Jurecic, the managing editor of Lawfare, wrote this for The Washington Post.
It’s both an exploration of the values Trump has tried to pervert and an explanation of why those values matter.