The Daily - James Comey Opens Up About Ego, Distrust and More

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, had an elaborate plan to make public his memos documenting his interactions with President Trump, in the hopes of prompting the appointment of a special counsel. In an interview, he explains his decision to take matters into his own hands. Guest: Mr. Comey. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, it was an elaborate plan to open up his memos to the public in order to trigger the creation of a special council to carry out an investigation of the president that he didn't trust the rest of the government to do. James Comey explains his decision to yet again take matters into his own hands.

It's Friday, April 20th. Is everything sounding good? Yep. Just maybe tell us about how wonderful that photo experience was outside. It was breathtaking. Flashing, really. Yeah. Yeah.

I said to you, I've never been videotaped in an elevator before. It's really exciting. We're all multimedia now. So we're going to jump in. Are we sounding good? Great. Thank you again for coming. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. And welcome to The Daily, End of the Times. Great to be here. Director, I want to start by reading you something that you wrote in the opening pages of your book, actually in the author's note, right up at the top. You said, all people have flaws, and I have many. Some of mine, as you'll discover in this book, are that I can be stubborn, prideful, overconfident, and driven by ego. I've struggled with those my whole life. What compelled you to open your book by noting your flaws?

I think one of the challenges I think I faced in writing this book is a lot of people already have a view of me that is formed. And one of the, there's all kinds of narrative streams as to why I'm a jerk, but one of the narrative streams about why I'm a jerk is, you know, he's a showboater, I'm a jerk, but one of the narrative streams about why I'm a jerk is, you know, he's a showboater, he's a egomaniac. And in part, I wanted to hit that head on at the beginning and be transparent with people about how I think about it and then talk about how I've tried to deal with it. But you confronted that in a sense by saying it's kind of true, the ego question. Yeah, I guess that's right. I don't think I was thinking about confronting it so much as making sure that I am, because I think that's an important part of who I am as a leader, not just as a person,

because so much of what I've tried to do as a leader is guardrail around what I think my weaknesses are. Really important to me that I avoid the danger, which I think all humans have, but I know I have, of falling in love with my own view of things, my own righteousness. And so I really think it was a prelude and maybe unconsciously, but not explicitly or consciously a reaction to some of the criticism, if that makes sense. It does. As you've been reflecting on the experiences of the past 18 months in writing this book and processing everything that happened. Can you give me an example of a moment where you were driven by ego, as the phrase you used, in your relationship with President Trump? I don't know that I can identify one with President Trump. I associate a couple of small

mistakes I think I made in the Clinton email investigation with, not certain of this, but a risk of ego. I don't consciously associate any of my encounters with President Trump with an ego weakness on my part. And how about the Clinton one? Well, I think that among the screw-ups I think I can identify is one that my children pointed out initially. They called it sea cresting, where I thought that if— Seacresting, as in Ryan Seacrest? Yeah. And I'm not looking to pick on Ryan Seacrest,

but my kids' take is that Ryan Seacrest was often guilty of this, I'm about to announce this thing, but first, this commercial. And they said, Dad, by waiting till the very end of your announcement on July the 5th to say what it is you were going to do, we think you seacrested it. Kind of publicly tortured people. Yeah. And I kind of brushed that off. And then the more I thought about it, the more I thought actually people were confused. What I was thinking was, this is where I think it's an ego issue, is I thought I knew best and that if I announced the result at the front, nobody will listen to what I I say and the what I say about why we were reaching this conclusion and the transparency was essential to people having

confidence that we were doing it in an independent way. But I think the criticism was actually valid. But the reason I associate it with ego is I think I thought I knew the right way to do it. And in hindsight, especially with great feedback from my family, I don't think I did. I want to come back to this question of you believing you knew the right path, but let's just hold on to that thought. We want to focus a lot of this conversation on the now famous memos that you wrote as FBI director, documenting your interactions with President Trump, and in some cases, President-elect Trump. You've acknowledged that after the president fired you,

you asked a friend of yours to share the contents of those memos, or at least one memo. One of the memos, right. With the New York Times, with the explicit intention of triggering a special counsel investigation. So take us back to the beginning. Why did you write the very first memo? I believe it was January 6th.

You have just left a meeting at Trump Tower with the president-elect. So what has occurred in that meeting that prompts you to start to put in memorandum form your experience with him? That meeting had two parts to it, one with other intelligence community leaders present and then another without them, just myself and the president-elect. The purpose of that second session was for me to brief the president-elect on some salacious material, an allegation that the Russians had compromising material of a sexual nature on the president-elect. This is the dossier. Correct. A portion of the dossier, the so-called dossier, that related to his conduct. And the goal of the conversation was, the so-called dossier that related to his conduct. And the goal of the conversation was twofold.

First, to alert him to materials that we were aware of, the intelligence community, that we thought were about to become public, and we were right. And second, in the event there was something to it, one of the things the FBI does in its counterintelligence role is try to do a defensive briefing. That is, if someone is possibly subject to any kind of coercion or blackmail, you tell them, look, we know about this, which makes it less likely that an adversary will be able to utilize that information. But my understanding is that you had never kept memos in this way before, and you have served several presidents. Correct. I don't remember ever writing a memo about a communication with a president or any other senior official. I don't. I never created a memo of an encounter with the president. So there's something inherent in this president that's different, it sounds like.

Oh, yes. And is dishonesty, in your mind, the core? The core concern for memo creation? Sure. The notion that the truth and integrity were not his track record, at least so far as I could see, was not one where they were high values in his life. And so the memos are, in a sense, a protective measure in this power dynamic. Well, a protective measure in the life of the FBI and to protect the organization. and to protect the organization,

I was having a conversation with the president or president-elect that touched on the FBI's core responsibilities and then involved the president or president-elect personally. So they weren't about policy questions or things like that, but they're about personal issues. And I worried that given the nature of the person I was talking to, if it ever became an issue, he might well lie about the content of that communication. And so I needed to have a written record so I could remember it clearly to protect the FBI and also to protect myself. Right, because with two people in the room, there's just two possible accounts.

Correct. Not a third, nobody verifying anything. Unless there's a tape. We'll get to that. What did you do with the first memo after you wrote it? I can't say. That was a detail that the FBI asked me to take out of the book. And so I can't say.

Okay. So when was the next time that you wrote a memo about your interaction with the president? I think the next one was the dinner on Friday night, the 27th of January, 2017. At the White House. Correct. And this is an encounter in which, as I recall, the president asks you for something, something quite valuable to him. Correct. He asked me for loyalty at the beginning and then again at the end of the dinner, near the end of the dinner. And so how exactly

does this work? You leave the White House, I assume you get into a government SUV. And how does the memoir writing actually unfold? My recollection is that I did it that night as soon as I got home on my personal laptop and printed it out on my printer, created two copies, initialed them both. These weren't on letterhead because these were personal aide de memoirs. So you're printing them out and signing them? Correct. Initialing them. I think I just initialed and dated them. Printed it out and put a copy of my personal safe at home and took another copy to the FBI the next workday and had my chief of staff hold it.

One stored at the FBI, one stored at my home. At this point, now that the president has behaved in a way that you find problematic, seriously problematic, are you starting to think about what these memos might be for a little bit differently? Not just traditional record keeping, not just an account in case it's needed. And I ask that because you're writing them in a way, as I understand it, that's unclassified, which suggests that you might have thought that someday they might,

for one reason or another, become public. Well, I don't think I thought about that at that point. I wrote it that way because you can't store classified information. Although your personal safe is secure, it's supposed to be stored in a government safe, it's classified. And so I wanted to be sure that I was storing it appropriately. Right, given especially the investigation, you had just been involved. Of course, and even if there wasn't, it's something that is drilled into you when you go into the government, especially in an FBI role. And so this is about, in the event it's ever needed to protect the FBI and myself.

But are you starting to imagine a world in which the behavior you're documenting in the memos might need to be shared more broadly? I don't think so at that point. I don't think I was contemplating that future. And my hope was that I would never need the memo. That it would just remain hidden. Correct. So then the third memo, and the last one I'm going to ask you about, is about this other moment we've all heard about, February 14th, Valentine's Day. The president is in the White House. He's in the Oval Office. You're in there for a meeting. And one by one, the president asks the vice president and then the attorney general to leave the Oval Office and essentially asks you, once you're alone, if you would consider dropping the investigation into Michael Flynn, right? But if you would consider makes it sound more of a question than a direction. He said, I hope we would let it go. So yes, that was February 14th at the end of a meeting that was called for a counterterrorism briefing.

And so you walk out of that meeting and once again, it feels like at this point there's a little bit of a system and a threshold in your head. This meeting merits a memo. I had sort of a sense of when I needed to document something. And so this one clearly needed to be documented. And I remember emailing my staff because I was headed home. It was Valentine's Day. And one doesn't always go home on Valentine's Day, but I'm married and deeply in love with my wife, and so I needed to get home for Valentine's Day.

And I remember emailing my staff that the meeting had gone fine, but now I need to write another memo. So your staff knows what you mean when you say, I need to write another memo. Yes. They get it. Yeah. In your account of that February 14th meeting in the Oval Office in which the president asks you, says he hopes that you can let the Flynn matter go. You said in your book that you had no choice but to stay in the Oval Office alone with the president. Those are the words you used. When he asked these other people in the room to leave one by one. And I wonder why you didn't have a choice.

We talked a little earlier about power dynamics, but you are at this point the director of the FBI. You are a profoundly distinguished lawman. You're an independent operator. And you are, by your own description, stubborn and prideful. So why do you have to stay? Why do you have no choice in the matter to be alone with the president in the Oval Office? I don't suppose there's literally no choice.

I mean, I was not handcuffed to a chair. But given that I am the director of the FBI and the president of the United States has, in essence, issued an order for the room to be cleared and me to stay, it never entered my mind to walk out. Just because of my respect for the office, the literal physical office in which I stood and the office of the president of the United States. I can't imagine many things people can second guess, but walking out at that moment, I don't think is one that could be fairly second guess. But I guess what I'm getting at is why at this point as FBI director, aren't you doing anything more just writing these stories down and locking them away, even if there are two copies, one at the FBI, one at home, and hoping, as you said, that they never end up having to be seen? Well, I'm doing more than that, I think,

including in the course of the dinner with the president on the 27th, trying to interject, to explain to him why it's important for there to be distance between the president and the Justice Department and why I was there a week earlier, about a week earlier, February the 8th, talking to his chief of staff, and part of that conversation was about the appropriate channels for communicating with the FBI. But as I recall, that meeting with Reince Priebus ends with him, in your mind, inappropriately guiding you over to the president once more

to have a conversation you didn't even really want to have, but you had it. Yep. And then the day after the Valentine's Day conversation, I spoke to the attorney general, my direct boss, and told him, it can't happen that you're kicked out of a room and the president meets with me. You have to be between me and the president. But you chose not to tell the attorney general about what the president asked of you, which was to drop the Flynn investigation. Correct. That was a conscious decision not to tell. Yep, absolutely. Because we believe, that was something we had discussed, the FBI senior

leadership team, that he was shortly going to be recused or step away from anything related to Russia. But why not tell the AG? It just seems like the most natural thing to tell your boss. Well, for that reason, we thought... That he wasn't going to be doing it much longer, or is it a little more fundamental that you might not have trusted him? No, I don't think it was that. He was so new at that point. I think he'd only been there a week or so. And he was, as a legal matter, going to be walled off from anything related to this. And so, why would we hand him something when there's already been a conclusion, and we had heard this from career officials inside the Justice Department, that he was going to be walled off. So, it wouldn't make any sense to hand him this, and then he'd have to be on the other side of a

wall. Forgive me for a second, though, but if I know my boss is just outside this room, is about to not be my boss, I think I'm still going to tell him about a pressing matter that feels deeply inappropriate, something that's occurred in my work, even if he's not going to be in that job for that much longer, right? The sort of chain of command seems important. Yeah, it didn't feel that way to us. We couldn't think in the immediate moment about a way to corroborate it. So what do we do with this? Because it's just the two of you. Just the two of us. And so the decision that we made as a team was, we'll keep it in a metaphorical box so it doesn't infect the investigative team.

We'll hold it close and we won't share it with the attorney general because he will be shortly, we think, out of anything related to Russia. And we'll figure out what to do with it down the road. Looking back now, do you think that was the right decision? I do. And why? For the reasons I just said. I don't think it would make sense to be briefing the Attorney General on a matter that directly related to the subject from which he would be shortly recused. Okay. And especially because it was nothing for him to do. The important thing, something he could do, is to understand my discomfort with being alone with the president and the importance of staying between me and the president.

And do you think that registered with him? I guess that registered in what sense? Do you think that Attorney General Sessions absorbed your discomfort with being alone with the president and acted on it in such a way that it might not recur? No, the first part, yes. I think he clearly understood, and I asked my chief of staff to call his afterwards just to make sure he understood. But whether he could or would do anything to maintain that separation, I didn't see any evidence of that. So in all, how many memos do you think

that you ended up writing about your conversations with the president? I don't remember exactly. It's somewhere between five and ten. Yeah, I don't know because I don't have them, but it's more than five and it's less than ten. Got it. And you don't have them because they have been taken from you? I turned them over to the FBI at their request. Okay. So then you are, in fact, fired by the president. Although I know the chyron that you see first says resigned, which must have surprised you because you did not resign. You were, in fact, fired in May of 2017. And at some point not long after that, we now all know, you decided you wanted these memos out in the world. What happened to finally set that

decision into motion? A middle of the night, which almost never happens to me because I'm a sound sleeper, but a middle of the night lightning bolt revelation, delayed revelation. I was fired on a Tuesday. The next few days after my firing, there were articles that appeared in various newspapers where it appeared. I believe the Times in particular had a story about it. Yeah, I think the Times, and I don't know if anybody else, but it appeared that. About the loyalty dinner. Yeah, about loyalty, and there was something else too. I can't remember what it was, but that gave the president apparently cause to believe

that I was talking to the media, which I was not. And he tweeted on Friday after I was fired, so three days later, and I may have this wrong, but James Comey better hope there aren't tapes before he starts leaking to the media. And I didn't focus on that right away because I was in this place where I was trying to keep all of this out of my head.

So I don't remember thinking about it until I woke up in the middle of the night, Monday night, so into early Tuesday morning. I think it was two in the morning. I opened my eyes in bed and thought, wait a minute, if there are tapes, there will be corroboration. It won't be my word against the president, which was the problem we encountered to begin with, that there are tapes. He will be heard on those tapes saying what I recorded him saying in my memo. Someone's got to go get those tapes. And lying there in bed, I thought the FBI will see what I see.

They probably saw it days before. I don't know. Right. He has 50 million Twitter followers. Right. But I mean, not just see it, but realize the significance of it in connection with the Valentine's Day meeting, particularly. And at that point, my conclusion was I can trust the FBI to see it

and to want to go get those tapes. But I honestly didn't trust the leadership of the Department of Justice to pursue it aggressively. And so I thought something's got to be done to force them to go get the tapes from the Oval Office. And it's going to take a special prosecutor to pursue those. If I put out in the public square the February 14th, the substance of it, it will be clear the significance of the president's tweet about tapes, and it will force something that otherwise wouldn't happen. And I thought, well, I'm a private citizen now. That information is unclassified, and so I will ask a friend of mine to get it out into the media. Right. So it was the mention of the tapes by the president in this tweet that first planted this idea that if I release these memos, I'll trigger the special counsel and we'll get the tapes.

Correct. Okay. And do you believe that you triggered the special counsel? I don't know. I don't. Again, because I don't have any visibility into what the FBI was doing. For all I know, and I'm just making this up, the FBI had already sent a memo over saying we believe there ought to be a special counsel appointed. That's possible. And so I may have had no role, but that's why I say I don't know.

So do you believe that it would have happened eventually no matter what? I don't know. You can make an argument it would be likely that it would happen regardless. The chronology is kind of powerful in terms of timing, your contribution to it. Yeah, I mean, look, that's why I say I think it's possible that I was either a factor or the determining factor. You have told a story a few times about waking up in the middle of the night with this realization that if there are tapes, they might back up the accounts that you have been documenting

in these memos. But I have to say, in hearing that and reading it in the book, and forgive me, the notion that the president had a secret recording of this conversation at the White House has always struck me as implausible. And something he just was saying because he was angry and he didn't like the fact that you were out there communicating your side. Did you really believe that he had tapes? Certainly not for certain. But I thought there was a real prospect, given his really believe that he had tapes?

Certainly not for certain, but I thought there was a real prospect given his tweet that he did. And someone needed to go find out. But ultimately, was it more important to you that there be a special counsel investigation than that there be a way of getting the tapes? No, I don't think more important. I mean, what I woke up thinking about was the tapes, getting the tapes, someone's got to go get the tapes. Mm-hmm. Is another possible explanation that the president had just fired you, which is a pretty traumatic experience, and one that would be pretty difficult on anybody, and you knew these memos would cause him a lot of trouble, and you sincerely wanted the public to see them. No. I mean, it's possible somebody else would have thought that,

and maybe that's a more noble way of thinking about it, but I wasn't thinking in terms of broader public interest or any of those things at the time. So your plan, again, is release the memos, get a special counsel, get the special counsel to go get the tapes. I'm sorry to keep interrupting you. Memo. A lot of people have been talking about memos. Single, unclassified memo.

Yep. So the plan is to release a memo, get a special counsel, have the special counsel hopefully get the tapes. That plan feels pretty complicated and elaborate in terms of steps and moves and pieces. Could there have been a simpler way? I don't know. Maybe you want to suggest one, but that's what I thought of at 2 o'clock in the morning is that that would put pressure on,

force the Department of Justice to do what had been talked about in the media that they were considering doing. Right. Because you didn't trust the Department of Justice to do the right thing on its own. Correct. You said perhaps there's a suggestion.

The simpler solution might be just to go to the FBI or the Department of Justice and just say, you should ask for those tapes. Yeah, but the FBI already knows what I know. And so if I can be useful, it's in putting pressure on the Department of Justice leadership, not the FBI. But given that I lacked confidence in the leadership

of the Department of Justice, going to the FBI would be telling them something they already knew. But let's focus on the Department of Justice. I mean, isn't it a sign that there's something fundamentally broken when the former director of the FBI doesn't trust the Department of Justice or think it's capable of doing its job? Sure. That you've essentially felt you needed to work around this agency full of law enforcement officials to deal with a situation that ideally they would deal with on a routine basis. Right. It is filled with law enforcement officials, but it's led by individual human

beings. And I knew the attorney general was recused. And given how I thought the deputy attorney general had handled my firing, I did not have confidence that it would be done in the right way. This is Rod Rosenstein. Correct. That does feel like a sad state of affairs. Oh, sure. There's a whole lot of sad states of affairs over the last couple of years. But yeah, sure, it's regrettable. You write about this in your book. You say about your thinking at the time, I could leave it alone. I could trust the system to work. But you decided in the end that you, as we've just established, that you didn't trust the system. And you were going to do things your own way.

And that calls to mind some of the words you used to describe yourself in the book, in the author's note. Overconfident, stubborn, driven by ego. What do you think? Yeah, I don't think that's fair. Okay. Why not? Because I don't think ego, stubbornness, overconfidence played a significant role in those decisions. Those are things I always ask myself when I make decisions, but I thought I was quite logical and practical in trying to do something I thought was in the public interest,

in the interest of the Justice Department. I want to ask you about this because it feels, and please feel free to interrupt me if you think I'm mistaken here, that we're seeing a recurring pattern a bit here in which you lack faith in the system to work through the kind of official normal functions. And let me give you a couple of examples of where it seems you decide it's important and right to take matters into your own hands. You felt during the Clinton investigation that you could not entirely trust the Department of Justice under Loretta Lynch to handle that probe of the private email server, which prompted you to take it upon yourself to make a pretty unusual— I disagree with your—you want me to interrupt already? I disagree with your predication. You want to keep going? I think so. Okay, keep rolling.

Object at the end. Keep rolling. Objection withdrawn. And after that investigation was closed, but new information surfaces because of what happened with Anthony Weiner, and there are new emails, you decided that that needed to be made public, even though it was a pretty significant break with precedent to do that so close to an election. And then, of course, in this case with President Trump, you decide to make public your conversations with him through the media to trigger a special counsel investigation. So please feel free to object if you don't see a pattern there. I don't. I see you drawing a line, respectfully, as they say in court, through three dots that I would treat differently. First, I would point out the context. What's different about the memo disclosure is that's a decision I'm making on my own. The decisions in the late spring, early summer of 2016, and then again in October is a decision I'm making with a group of smart, thoughtful people debating it constantly to try to get to the right result.

And they're different circumstances. The first circumstance is not about not trusting the Department of Justice, but it's about caring deeply about how the Department of Justice is perceived. justice, but it's about caring deeply about how the Department of Justice is perceived. And in light of circumstances that are beyond my control, finding a situation where the FBI, I, and the rest of our team thinks to protect the institutions, we have to do something unusual. Not that I don't like Loretta Lynch, not that I don't respect Loretta Lynch, but circumstances have created a situation where if we do the normal thing, corrosive damage will happen in the life of these institutions we love. October is very different. It's not about the institutions and not being able to deal effectively with a particular leader. It's about we're facing a

choice. We have two terrible options. Which one is the least bad? The third one, the reason I don't see the dots being susceptible of a single line, the third one is a decision I'm making in the middle of the night on my own without probing and debate and cross-examination by my colleagues. And so I see them differently than you do. But in every case, it feels like you're playing things out in your mind and determining how you think things might play out, how they might be perceived, and making a decision based on your belief of how those things might play out and how those things might be perceived, rather than just following protocol and letting things fall as they may. Does that feel fair? And reaching a considered judgment, again, not on my own, a considered judgment with very smart colleagues, that the normal thing will be much worse for the institution. And that the unusual thing, and this is why I cringe a little at the notion that it's ego, I knew how much this was going to suck for me.

I knew my reputation was going to take an enormous hit. I knew it in July, and God, I knew it in October was going to be even worse. And so I don't, you know, I'm trying to cross-examine myself and be fair, but I don't think that's a fair characterization to say it's driven by ego. I've heard it a lot. I just don't think it's fair. Okay. But even if you're doing this with the most noble intentions, you are someone who believes in the rule of law and in the power of institutions. How could you not when you are someone who ends up in the job of being FBI director? So how should we understand this pattern of using your own judgment and taking matters into your own hands, deciding for yourself what's best, in a sense, for all of us? Yeah, I think that's a summation, a synthesis that I

would reject at the outset. Again, I think, I know the human brain craves patterns from data points. I just don't see the pattern, except in this respect. I'm trying to make decisions in the best interest of the institution, again, at the highest level. And the process for making, I keep coming back to this, but the process for making those decisions is really, really important. Because it's not me waking up in the middle of the night deciding, you know what I need to do? I need to announce this email thing separate from Loretta Lynch. It's an agonizing, considered debate about how to handle a situation, always starting with the top-level values of the institution. Because there are times, and Department of Justice policy recognizes this, when something unusual has to be done

that's in the interest of justice. But the sense that the DOJ won't deal with something or might not deal with it appropriately, so you're going to. When I hear you say that, or when I read it in your book, a phrase came into my head, and I'm just going to say what popped into my head right away. It was something that the president said when he was a candidate. I alone can fix this. I don't think you can read the book and leave the word I or alone in that sentence. Okay. Because look, I know my weaknesses. I think I do. And I've always consciously designed teams to guard rail around them. I think all leaders do because of the danger of falling in love with your own perspective. So I'm ultimately responsible for the decisions, but there was no I and alone in those decisions.

When it came to Loretta Lynch, though, you've gone out of your way to explain that you needed a very small group of people to know the decision you were going to be making about how to discuss Hillary Clinton's use of the private email server. So alone, no. But small circle of advisors, yes. I don't know, somewhere between six and 12, maybe 10. And so a pretty good circle at different levels of people, different perspectives, different jobs, and really good agonizing conversations to try and figure out what the right thing to do was. That's why I reject the I and the alone. There are clearly many differences between you and the president, unquestionably.

But do you think that in some ways you were fired by the president because you are both such independent, strong-willed people? I don't. Then why? Why was I fired? Yeah. I thought it was because of what the president said,

that it was because of the Russia investigation, and now I see him saying something different, and both of those can't be true. And so my best information was what the president had said shortly after my firing. I guess what I mean is he repeatedly asked you to stop doing things, stop investigating Michael Flynn or to lift the cloud over his head in another phone call he had with you. And you made it abundantly clear that you were not going to do that. So here

you have two stubborn gentlemen. Yeah, but I would, I don't want to be too fair to the president, but I would reject the word stubborn there. Wanting to do things consistent with the norms, traditions, values of your institution. I don't think it's stubbornness. Stubbornness, to my mind, connotes an unreasoning, a thoughtless refusal to do something. I really wouldn't associate that with decisions that we at the FBI made in this context, including in our interactions with the president. I hear that. For all your criticisms of the president, you did not leave your position

under protest. You were fired as we've established. I wonder if you thought about what would have happened if you hadn't been fired. Do you think you would still be the FBI director right now? I think so. I mean, again, I can't live an imagined life, but it's possible to have been fired because there was some other collision. But my plan was to stay. In fact, my commitment to stay increased continually

because of my role in protecting an institution like the FBI. So as your displeasure and your alarm grew, your resolve to stay also grew? Yeah, probably in tandem, which may seem odd. But given how I felt about the FBI and its role as an independent national security and law enforcement organization, I thought it's all the more important that I stay. So based on what you just said, does any part of you wish that you were still in this job? Yes. The part that loves the people and the mission.

That's what I miss the most. How do you feel about the fact that the FBI is taking such a public beating right now? I hate it. I think it's regrettable, even dangerous, and something that people of all political stripes should recognize, not just regret, but work to counter. Because the FBI is not politicized, it's being politically attacked. And we all, I don't care what your political beliefs are, we all need an independent Federal Bureau of Investigation. beliefs are, we all need an independent Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do you hear from your former colleagues with any kind of frequency? I imagine they must be quite distressed, especially given what the president says about the investigation. I hear a lot from FBI employees. I've got endless cards and letters and t-shirts and mugs from FBI employees, but I don't speak to the senior leadership that people would otherwise have been around me at the time. Does any particular card stand out?

I actually used to sit on my porch and I could only read them about 20 at a time before I got a pain in my chest from their sadness and my sadness and not being with them. So there's none that stand out. They're just, despite what you may have heard, the best part about my job was my connection to those people. And so reading about their grief, which reflects my grief, is the hardest part. Do you worry that this book tour that you're on, all the interviews that you're doing, all the things that you're saying, will inevitably contribute to that perception of politicization? I worry a little bit,

which is why I'm so keen to make sure people understand what this book is about and what I hope to accomplish with this book. And that if people read it and have the kind of conversation I hope they'll have in the wake of it, it will actually be good for the reputation of the FBI and more broadly force a conversation about something

that we're so busy reading tweets and fighting with each other about personalities that we're not having. But you yourself decided to become somebody who goes on Twitter and criticizes back. And so I'm just trying to hold up a little bit of an area. Yeah, but I'm not. Well, sure.

But I think if you read my collection of tweets, first of all, you'll cringe at my photography and at some of my quotations from philosophers. But my goal there in the main is not to be ad hominem. And I don't think you've seen me responding to people with ad hominem attacks. We hate so quickly in this country across policy divisions, policy disagreements. And I'm hoping the conversation that, first of all, I'll model it by acting this way, not hating anybody over their views about policy, but instead urging people to focus on that thing, which is higher than that and more important than that. But let's say you were still in your role. What do you imagine you would be doing right now, given where we are in this saga?

I would be supervising an FBI team that was continuing an investigation of Russian interference in the American election and possible role of any Americans in assisting or conspiring with the Russians. And there may or may not be a special counsel investigation going on? There might be. It's hard to say, but I would assume that I'd still be in the job, still doing my best to lead the organization. Dr. Comey, thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. Yep. On Thursday afternoon, the Justice Department sent redacted copies of Comey's closely kept memos recounting his interactions with President Trump to Congress. The broad outlines of the memos had already been reported

by the Times back in May of last year, following Comey's decision to make them public, and are discussed in Comey's book. But the memos themselves are believed to be key evidence in a possible obstruction of justice case being pursued by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. South Korea says that North Korea has dropped its decades-old demand that American troops withdraw from the Korean Peninsula as a condition for giving up nuclear weapons.

The U.S. has more than 28,000 troops in South Korea, a presence long cited by North Korea as its justification for developing nuclear weapons. The reversal, if confirmed to be true, could make it far likelier for the U.S. to reach a nuclear deal with North Korea. a nuclear deal with North Korea. And the Trump administration is expected to impose a $1 billion penalty on Wells Fargo today for a variety of alleged misdeeds, including forcing customers to buy auto insurance policies that they didn't need.

President Trump has advocated rolling back regulations on the banking industry, but this marks the toughest action his administration has taken against a major bank to date. with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick,

Michaela Bouchard, and David Krakals. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you Monday.