The NPR Politics Podcast - Comey Tells NPR The FBI 'Would Be Worse Today' If Not For His Actions

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

In an interview with NPR, fired FBI Director James Comey defended his controversial decisions during the 2016 campaign. This episode: host/political reporter Asma Khalid, national political correspondent Mara Liasson and justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Matias calling from New Jersey. I am waiting for my naturalization ceremony to become an American citizen and be able to vote in the next elections. This podcast was recorded at 2.56 p.m. on Tuesday, April 17th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR political coverage at npr.org, on the NPR One app, or at your local public station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast, and we're here with a special episode about

former FBI Director James Comey. Do you think the FBI's credibility is better or worse than it was a couple of years ago? It's worse. But again, people can disagree about this, and people I respect will. But my judgment is it would be worse today had we not taken the, picked the least bad alternatives. That was James Comey in an interview with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep and our own Kerry Johnson. There is so much to discuss about Comey, his new book, his big media tour, and what this all means. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Kerry Johnson, justice correspondent. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

All right, folks, so let us just jump right in. Carrie, can you just remind us, because it's been a little while, how James Comey kind of and said he would recommend no charges against Hillary Clinton. Then the FBI and other investigators discovered a whole bunch of emails on the computer of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband, now former husband of one of Hillary Clinton's closest aides. Comey notified Congress in October, in October before the election. They were reopening the investigation. And then just a few days before the election, Comey once again notified Congress they didn't find anything important. They were closing that investigation again. Hillary Clinton has said she felt like she was shivved by James Comey and she's blamed him in large part for losing the election. You met James Comey yesterday. You were interviewing him.

So before we actually get into the substance of what he had to say, I am just curious how he was on a personal level, right? He's been such a punching bag, it feels like, for both Clinton supporters at first and now Trump supporters. Yeah. And, you know, I think that's finally starting to show in his demeanor and in the way he represents himself to the world. Comey is a person who had endless confidence for as long as I've known him. I think I met him in 2002 when he was still the Southern District of New York U.S. attorney, one of the best jobs in the country. He then moved on to the Justice Department to be deputy attorney general, went into private practice, private legal work for corporations and hedge funds. And then he came back to be the FBI director. He's a guy who's in charge of his own message.

He's super articulate. He's really personable, great sense of humor, can get a laugh out of anyone. He did laugh yesterday, but he looked different to me for the first time. Like physically look different? Physically look different. And his attitude was a little different. He said he was a little bit beaten down by all those punches he took from the left and the right in 2016. And I wonder if he hasn't entirely recovered from that yet. Did he talk about why he's talking now? You know, I asked him a question about that. He said he wanted to set the record straight, and he's built this book as a part memoir, part leadership lessons book, and part book about

Donald Trump and all the other presidents for whom he's worked. I asked him, though, about why he's talking now when there's an ongoing criminal and national security investigation. Normally, you don't want your witnesses out talking if they're going to have to testify later. And I don't know whether I have to testify later. But if I did, the advantage in my circumstance is my testimony is locked down. And I testify in front of Congress extensively. I wrote memos. I wrote written testimony. And so long as I continue to tell the truth and don't start making stuff up that's inconsistent with that testimony, I don't see an issue. Again, I don't know whether there's going to be a future proceeding where I'll be needed.

But if there is, I think the prosecutors will be okay with me. He's not sure whether there is going to be an obstruction of justice case built against President Donald Trump or anyone else. He says it's possible. He didn't want to assess the strength of that case at this time, since he's just a witness in the investigation. But he did hold out the prospect that he'd be called to testify in court or somewhere else someday. And of course, his statements to people like us and NPR and other news outlets could be a fruitful source of cross-examination if we ever get to that point. First of all, I just want to say something to our podcast listeners that when I read through the entire transcript of Stephen Carey's interview with Comey, this was much longer than what you might have heard on Morning Edition. I was proud to work at NPR. I thought it was just terrific. And it took the story further than the interviews that he'd done on ABC. And I was

really, really proud. And I thought Carrie did a fabulous job. This is why Carrie is on earth, to do this kind of thing that no one else can do. There's so many layers to this. There's, you know, the Comey as the kind of bit player in history, the man who killed Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming president, the man who was at the center of a possible obstruction case against Donald Trump, the guy who was trying to do the right thing and wrestle with his big ego at the same time. And now you have him being almost the voice of the resistance talking about how the president is morally unfit. You know, the big takeaway for me was when you asked him what David Margolis, the Yoda of the Justice Department, would have said to him. And I think he said he would have said, you're screwed because there's no way for him to win. Yeah. And he said 2016 was a 500-year flood, maybe a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a- multiple-generations occurrence. There was no manual for him to consult about how to do this. There wasn't anything ordinary at all about this. The FBI is criminally investigating

one of the two candidates for president of the United States in the middle of an election year. I don't think it's ever happened. I pray it never happens again. But anyhow, I saw this as a 500 year flood. And so where is the manual? What do I do? He said, maybe I did some things wrong. Maybe I made some mistakes.

But Comey pretty much stands by his decisions, which people on both the left and the right are really angry with him about. Right. And he can't satisfy either side. He can't possibly satisfy the Hillary Clinton hardliners or diehards who think that he's the reason she isn't the president. He'll never satisfy the president, although the president really liked him when he came out at the end of the campaign to reopen the Hillary Clinton investigation. You know, he is no longer the rectitudinous lawman, you know, the embodiment of the FBI creed. He's a bestselling author and a celebrity. And that's why he says that he wrote these colorful descriptions of the president's complexion and his tie and his small hands. And Carrie, I love that you really candidly asked James Comey about this and how, in fact, some readers might see this as a distraction from his overall point. It was in my brain because I kept thinking about Michelle Obama.

When they go low, we go high. And here's this guy kind of saying, oh, the president's tie is too long. His hair is really elaborate. I looked at it for a long time and I just thought, gosh, is this what he wants to be saying? And his hue, right? Didn't he comment about his color of skin, his orange tint? Very orange and the little white pouches underneath the eyes, which Comey says probably come from those little goggles you wear when you go in the tanning booth. I wouldn't know anything about that, but that's what I've heard.

And I asked him about it. He seemed to get a little annoyed. Let's take a listen to that. I got a question for you. Over the last few days of your book tour, some people have argued that you've been stained by your interactions with the president. They don't understand why you engaged in some name-calling of the president and making fun of his appearance and the like in your book. And to them, that makes some of the more high-minded points you are trying to convey in the book less powerful.

Yeah, they should read the book. Because I'm not making fun of the president. I'm trying to be an author, which I've never been before in my life. But while I'm typing, I can hear my editor's voice ringing in my head. Bring the reader with you. Show them inside your head. Bring them with you. Describe the president's hands.

Can you hear the editor saying that? No, but that was on my mind. And by the way, not that this matters, but I found his hands to be above average in size. And so I'm not making fun of the man. I'm trying to tell the reader what's in my head. And the reason I say read the whole book is I hope you will see that richness of detail when I talk about the hospital scene, when I talk about terrible tragedy, when my wife and I lost our son, Colin, when I talk about President Obama, I talk about how skinny he struck me as. I'm not trying to make fun of President Obama.

I'm trying to show the reader this is how I was experiencing the world and bring them into those rooms with me. And so I really do think the folks who are picking up on that, it's just a sign to me they haven't read the book. I took those parts of Comey's book as just description. I did not think that he was disparaging Trump's appearance. I think he was describing it. He does have orange-hued skin, and he does have elaborately coiffed hair. Those are just descriptors. There are so many people who have made fun of Trump's appearance.

I didn't think he was doing that. On the other hand, Trump's appearance is one of the most inescapable things about him. But there is a bit of a tit for tat nature, I think, between him and President Trump at this point, right? I mean, he comes out with this book, President Trump starts hitting him on Twitter, calling him all sorts of names. And then even in your interview, didn't he respond to the way that President Trump was responding to him on Twitter? Yeah. Remember in the last week or so, President Trump has twice called James Comey, the former FBI director and deputy attorney general, a slime ball and suggested

that perhaps James Comey should be sent to jail. And we asked Comey about that. That's a remarkable thing to say. President Trump tweeted. I don't follow him on Twitter, but I get to see his tweets, tweeted, I don't know how many, but some tweets this past couple of days about me, that I should be in jail. The president of the United States just said that a private citizen should be jailed. And I think the reaction of most of us was, eh, that's another one of those things. This is not normal. This is not okay. There's a danger that we will become numb to it and we will stop noticing the threats to our norms, the threats to the rule of law and the threats most of all to the truth. And so the reason I'm talking in terms of morality is those are the things that matter most to this country. And there's a great

danger we'll be numbed into forgetting that. And then only a fool would be consoled by some policy victory. James Comey is saying the same things about threats to democratic norms, you know, basing a campaign on lock her up, lock her up, saying that this person and that person who's my enemy belongs in jail. There's a whole shelf full of books written right now about the threats to democracy and democratic norms. He's saying the same things, but because he is now locked in this WWF celebrity larger than life wrestling match with the president of the United States, it's getting a bit obscured by that. Because of who he is. Because of who he is and because of the fact that he's now chosen to step out of his previous role, which he already was slipping out of pretty fast, and come into this public role. But I think two takeaways, just substantive takeaways that I took from the interviews was, number one, to say that when the

president of the United States, and he says this repeatedly about many different peoples, not just James Comey, that they should be in jail. That is not normal in a democracy. When James Comey says it, does it give it a different sort of gravity? I don't know. It might give it less gravity because he's engaged in this fight with him. But the other takeaway was when he said he doesn't think the president should be impeached. And I thought that was really interesting. And if the resistance, so to speak, if the opposition to Donald Trump is going to embrace Comey in any way, shape or form, at least those that aren't super diehard Hillarys who can see their way to

doing that, I think he had some advice for them, which is, if you think impeachment is the answer, you're just letting voters off the hook, and you're not taking responsibility. And if you don't like Donald Trump, you should defeat him at the ballot box. What I think he was saying was that impeachment is just the left-wing version of lock her up. Opponents of Trump didn't like it when he ran a campaign based on lock her up, then they shouldn't be saying we should impeach the president. You know, one of the nuggets that stood out to me that actually, I would say, is far less maybe substantive, but I just really was drawn to it on a really personal level, was when you all asked him about what election night was like for him. So James Comey has publicly said that his wife and pretty much all of his daughters were Hillary Clinton supporters. They marched at the Women's March right after the inauguration. And you asked him what election

night was like for him. And I just want to play a little bit of that. We didn't talk about a lot because I knew how passionate she was about wanting the first female president, wanting it to be Hillary Clinton. And so it was nothing good for our marriage about talking about the decisions I'd had to make. And I mean, a part of me is like, really, you didn't talk to your wife about all of this. And there is a very journalist skeptical nature of me that questions the veracity of that to some degree. But I also think it sort of struck home a lot of just how personal and how many personal repercussions there were for James Comey in making some of these decisions that he made around the Hillary Clinton campaign. We asked Comey a couple of times about his relationship with his wife. His wife is a

major character in the book. Some people, including Susan Hennessey at Lawfare, have decided that Patrice Comey, Mrs. James Comey, is the hero of this book in many ways. She's often the voice of reason, pulling him back, giving him guidance, giving him support through this really brutal time that he and the country in some ways underwent, maybe together. And we're still fighting about how much blame he should shoulder for some of these situations we're in. But Patrice Comey seemed to always have her heart and her head in the right place. And she seems to be Jim Comey's best and most favorite advisor. He says that he married up, doesn't he?

He does. So, Carrie, did you ask Comey at all about whether or not he thinks or feels or has any evidence that Donald Trump would be indicted. Yeah, you know, it was important to me to get him on the record on this point, because he's talked about maybe he won't be a witness. And what situation might he not be a witness? The Justice Department has some legal opinions on the books that say, maybe you cannot indict a sitting president. So I put the question to Comey. Director Comey, can a sitting president be indicted by the Justice Department or a special counsel? I don't know the answer to that. My understanding, again, this is just from reading blogs and articles in the media, is that there's

an Office of Legal Counsel opinion that's currently alive and well that says a sitting president can't be. But I don't know enough to give you a view on whether that's a good opinion or not. I mean, it's so complicated. You know, here's a guy who cared about his reputation, which was pretty exalted. He tried to do the right thing. He made one mistake after another, in hindsight, you could say. During the 2016 election? During the 2016 election, during the 2016 election. Yeah. And even afterwards, how was he going to handle his relationship with the new president, Donald Trump, when Donald Trump did things that crossed Comey's lines, like asking him for to a private human being who, although he didn't, at least to you and Steve, admit that any of the things he did in hindsight were wrong or were mistakes. July 2016 about Hillary Clinton and his decision that the FBI would not recommend charges against

Hillary Clinton, that he seacrested the announcement. In other words, that he said all these negative things about Hillary Clinton and how she was extremely careless and left till the end the idea that the FBI would not recommend any charges like Ryan Seacrest does when he's teasing a commercial. He buried the lead and he should have flipped it by saying, I'm not going to indict her. Now I'm going to tell you all the other things I think about. But when Steve Inskeep, our morning host, pressed him about mistakes, Comey cited two mistakes. They're kind of obscure to anyone who hasn't covered the justice and FBI beat. One involves the fight he picked with Apple over encryption on the cell phones in San Bernardino, California,

around that attack, which he lost. And the other involves some verbiage in a speech he gave that really angered the Polish government and caused an international row. Neither of these episodes are things that are going to be on the minds of most of the people in the country. And they certainly don't touch at all on the 2016 election. Did he talk at all about just his willingness to constantly speak publicly and the degree at all to which this might affect how people perceive the FBI or the Justice Department? Well, he said he always kept the FBI, its reputation and its integrity in mind, first in mind. And he did a number of things to try to protect the integrity of the FBI and of the Justice Department.

The criticism, the rap on James Comey from Democrats, is that he tried to drive the car at the FBI and then he pulled over and grabbed the wheel at the Justice Department from Attorney General Loretta Lynch, too, which was really not his job. Not his job. But she has to accept some responsibility for meeting Bill Clinton on the tarmac. Oh, that tarmac, regardless of what they talked about. And my reporting at the time was that Bill Clinton wouldn't have talked to her about the email investigation because the Clinton campaign was 100 percent certain she was not going to be indicted. In other words, that was over for them. We should explain just a little bit, too, right? The whole backstory. So she's in charge of the Justice Department, which is investigating Hillary Clinton and her handling of emails. Before James Comey came out in July, she had a very

unfortunate, in retrospect, impromptu meeting on the tarmac when her plane and Bill Clinton's plane both ended up in the same airport at the same time. Bill Clinton came over and wanted to visit with her, came onto her plane, and they visited. Well, of course, that became a huge controversy as if Bill Clinton went over there and put the fix in for the investigation. I don't necessarily believe that happened, but it sure was a terrible appearance problem. So Loretta Lynch decided that because of that, and she was very apologetic about it, that she would not necessarily recuse herself, but she would defer to whatever James Comey decided to do in the investigation, as opposed to having it be her final decision, which it would have been ordinarily. But so she did that. That is what set in motion the chain of events that had him standing there in July at a press conference. Yeah, he also cites what he calls a piece of still classified information, which the Washington Post has reported is an email, which purports to say that Loretta Lynch

was in contact with members of the Clinton campaign. Loretta Lynch denies that the email appears to be false, even according to Jim Comey. But he says he worried that years later, if that email, perhaps created by the Russians, got out, it would cause yet another legitimacy problem for the FBI and the Justice Department. It seems like in so many ways, he's very concerned about his own personal reputation, at the same time as being concerned about the Justice Department's reputation. And I am curious to what degree, Carrie, you felt like this was a sort of Comey rehabilitation tour, the ability for him to clear his name or to set the record straight. Listen, the guy really hasn't talked except for congressional testimony

and some tweets since he was fired last May. And that was a deeply embarrassing and shocking event. Imagine being the FBI director your life, almost your whole life in public service, and finding out that you were fired by looking at a CNN crime on when you're in Los Angeles talking to some employees who don't know anything about it either. You come back and you find out the president has barred you from even reentering the FBI to pick up your stuff, like your pens and your papers and your stuff in your office. And this is a guy who devoted his entire life pretty much to keeping the country safe after 9-11 and in other incidents.

And he's been itching. He's been itching to talk. And he really does believe, as he calls it, the Trump administration is a forest fire. The country is burning. And it's the responsibility of people like him and people all over the country to get out and speak up. He reserved some special criticism for Republicans in Congress, who he says know better and are not standing up to this president in the way that they should. Yeah. I mean, look, James Comey has made a transition from lifelong public servant to something else. We don't know exactly what it is. We know it's a celebrity. That's one piece of it. Bestselling author. Who knows what his future holds? As a matter of fact, I asked him about this. Remember that there was a tweet from him, a public tweet last year, on a road in Iowa,

standing in the middle of the road, and I thought, he's running. With running shoes on. It's so metaphorical. I will never run for office. Not even a close call. What's next for me is I'm going to, I've signed up to teach. I taught this year at Howard University. I'm going to teach next year at my alma mater, William & Mary. I'm going to teach about leadership and ethics. And so I'm going to be a professor, which is exciting, and speak about leadership, travel around and speak about it. And I think by doing those things, I can be useful. I'm going to use my book in the class, and I'm going to buy it for the students because I'm not going to be one of those professors. That makes people buy. Yeah, heck yeah.

I've always hated that. Look, Americans worship at the Church of the Second Chance. And James Comey is extremely charismatic, even though he's incredibly controversial. Right now he seems kind of cursed, you know, like everybody hates him for different reasons. But although I do believe him, he's not going to run for office, although I do think that thought crossed his mind in the past, not once, but more than once. Who knows what's going to happen to him? I mean, he's a, you know, he's a larger than life creature. He's a larger than life creature, literally and figuratively. Yeah, at six foot eight. And he's also got a lot of gifts. You know, he is a deeply engaging public speaker.

He's a really smart guy. He has lessons about justice and education that he wants to share with people. And I'm sure he's going to find a way to share those in the years to come. You know, the guy's only in his mid-50s, maybe mid to late 50s. He's got a lot to say and let's hope a lot of time to say it. All right, that's all. Thank you for listening, and we will be back in your feed soon. You can keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. And if you're interested in sending us a timestamp, just email a recording of yourself

to NPR Politics, all one word, at NPR.org. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Keri Johnson, justice correspondent. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thanks for listening to the host of Fresh Air. I just interviewed James Comey. You know, when I spoke with Hillary Clinton, she said she thought Comey cost her the election. Hear what Comey says about that and about lots more by finding our interview in the Fresh Air feed.