As an investigator turned author, James Comey has developed a forensic eye for detail. The colour of the curtains in the Oval Office. The length of Donald Trump’s tie. Something about the US president that the camera often misses.
“Donald Trump conveys a menace, a meanness in private that is not evident in most public views of him,” says Comey, a former director of the FBI, from his home in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC.
That menace came flooding out to engulf the US on 6 January when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in Washington. Five people, including a police officer, were killed in the mayhem. Comey, whose unorthodox interventions in the 2016 election are blamed by many liberals for putting Trump in the White House, watched in horror.
“I was sickened to watch an attack on the literal and symbolic heart of our democracy, and, as a law enforcement person, I was angered. I am mystified and angry that Capitol Hill wasn’t defended. It’s a hill! If you wanted to defend it, you could defend it, and for some reason it was not defended. I think that’s a 9/11-size failure and we’re going to need a 9/11-type commission to understand it so that we don’t repeat it.”
If he were still at work in the FBI’s brutalist building on Pennsylvania Avenue, Comey would be at the heart of the hunt for the domestic terrorists. He misses the job. Aged 60, a father of five and grandfather of one, he has spent the pandemic learning yoga, training to become a foster parent again and preparing for a teaching job at Columbia University in New York.
Comey has also written another memoir, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency and Trust, a slender sequel to his 2018 bestseller, A Higher Loyalty. It includes anecdotes from his law enforcement career, tangling with the New York mafia and others, and quotations from William Shakespeare and Trump (who reported to Comey that “Putin told me: ‘We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world’”). It acknowledges the flawed history of his beloved FBI while defending the nobility of its purpose; he calls for it to strip the name of the former director J Edgar Hoover from its headquarters and rename it in honour of the civil rights hero John Lewis.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
