James Comey

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

James Comey served as Director of the FBI from 2013 until Donald Trump fired him in May 2017 — an act Trump later acknowledged was connected to the Russia investigation. His tenure is marked by two decisions with outsized electoral consequences: his July 2016 public rebuke of Hillary Clinton over her handling of a private email server, made while simultaneously declining to recommend prosecution, and his October 2016 letter to Congress announcing the investigation’s reopening eleven days before the election.

Comey’s firing triggered the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel and became a central event in subsequent obstruction-of-justice inquiries. He testified publicly before Congress in June 2017, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee in a statement for the record that Trump had asked him for “loyalty” and had pressed him to “let go” of the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn — accounts corroborated by contemporaneous memos Comey wrote and by Volume II of the Mueller Report. He subsequently published a memoir characterizing Trump as a threat to rule-of-law norms.

Earlier in his career, Comey served at the Department of Justice, where in March 2004 — as Acting Attorney General during Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospitalization — he refused to reauthorize a Bush-administration NSA warrantless-surveillance program, leading to a confrontation at Ashcroft’s bedside that he later recounted in sworn 2007 congressional testimony. As FBI Director, he was also a principal in the 2016 Apple–FBI encryption dispute over access to a locked iPhone.

Sources

• “Comey to Congress: President Trump told him ‘I need loyalty’” — PBS NewsHour. Source URL: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/comey-congress-president-trump-told-need-loyalty (tier 1)
• “Statement for the Record — James B. Comey, Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, June 8, 2017. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-jcomey-060817.pdf (tier 1)
• Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (Mueller Report), Volume II, pp. 39–48, U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf (tier 1)
• “Hospital Visit Highlights Surveillance Dispute” — The Washington Post, May 15, 2007. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2007/05/15/hospital-visit-highlights-surveillance-dispute/ (tier 1)
• “Comey Testifies on Hospital Room Drama” — The New York Times, May 16, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/washington/16justice.html (tier 1)
• “Apple, the FBI and iPhone Encryption: A Look at What’s at Stake” — NPR, February 17, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/17/467096705/apple-the-fbi-and-iphone-encryption-a-look-at-whats-at-stake (tier 1)