James Comey was in the middle of addressing FBI employees in Los Angeles when he learned from TVs playing in the background he had been fired — and no one from the White House or Department of Justice called him to tell him the news.
In a copy of “A Higher Loyalty” obtained by the Washington Examiner, Comey described the scene. He was in a conference room addressing communications staffers and cleaning workers about the mission of the FBI when he saw cable news start to report he’d left his job.
“I stopped in midsentence,” Comey wrote.
“On the TV screens along the back wall I could see COMEY RESIGNS in large letters. The screens were behind my audience, but they noticed my distraction and started turning in their seats. I laughed and said, ‘That’s pretty funny. Somebody pu a lot of work into that one.’ I continued my thought. ‘There are no support employees in the FBI, I expect…”
“The message on the screens now changed. Across three screens, displaying three different news stations, I now saw the same words: COMEY FIRED. I wasn’t laughing any longer. There was a buzz in the room. I told the audience, ‘Look, I’m going to go figure out what’s happening, but whether that’s true or not, my message won’t change, so let me finish it and then shake your hands.’”
Comey said he started receiving calls from friends and his wife, not knowing if the reports were true.
He eventually learned a White House employee had walked to FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. with a letter informing Comey he’d been fired. The letter, authored by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, said he was being fired for destroying morale at the FBI and not properly handling the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
However, Comey said he had heard nothing but positive feedback from President Trump, Sessions, and Rosenstein regarding his job performance.
“The FBI director travels with a communications team so he can be reached by the Justice Department or White House in seconds, any time of day or night. But, nobody called. Not the attorney general. Not the deputy attorney general. Nobody,” Comey wrote.
“I had actually seen the attorney general the day before. Days earlier, I had met alone with the newly confirmed deputy attorney general at his request so he could ask my advice on how to do his job — which I held from 2003 to 2005. … He not only didn’t call me, he had authored a memo to justify my firing, describing my conduct during 2016 as awful and unacceptable.”
Comey flew back to Washington on the FBI plane on which he flew to California — a flight that would later cause Trump to explode in anger at Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director — but not before a slow crawl to the airport through LA’s notorious traffic.
“News helicopters tracked our journey from the LA FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in LA traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel,” Comey wrote.
