There was great indignation and much disapproval last year when it was reported that President Trump had asked then-FBI Director James Comey for “loyalty.” Such a request, it was said, was more characteristic of a mob boss than a president — “mob boss” being a phrase Comey himself would use in a book whose title (A Higher Loyalty) he took from the president’s request.
Now, Comey’s book and the revelations it has triggered are casting new light on the “loyalty” issue — a light that makes Trump’s position look far more understandable.
The short version is this: In Trump’s first meeting with the FBI director, on January 6, 2017, when Trump was president-elect, Comey asked to meet alone with Trump. When the two were by themselves, face-to-face, Comey told Trump about the “golden showers” episode in the Trump dossier. Comey didn’t discuss any other parts of the dossier. He just outlined the dossier’s tale of Trump involved in a kinky sex show in a Moscow hotel room in 2013.
Not long after the Comey-Trump one-on-one meeting, news organizations reported that the intelligence community had briefed the president-elect on allegations of misconduct. Almost immediately after those reports, BuzzFeed published the entire dossier, “golden showers” and all.
Comey’s memo of the meeting — released in the midst of Comey’s publicity tour — does not mention that Trump asked for loyalty. In fact, it notes that Trump said a number of complimentary things about Comey. “He said he thought very highly of me and looked forward to working with me,” Comey wrote. But no talk of loyalty, at least as far as Comey noted.
At Comey’s next meeting with the president, however, on January 28, Trump brought up loyalty, according to the Comey memos. The two men were discussing leaks and how damaging they could be. Comey explained to the president that “the entire government leaks like crazy.” Then Comey wrote that, “[Trump] replied that he needed loyalty and expected loyalty.”
The news of that exchange — leaked by Comey after Trump fired him — spurred widespread outrage over Trump’s mention of loyalty. But the context of Trump’s statement — not known until now — adds to our understanding of the president’s talk.
Why would Trump wonder about the FBI director’s loyalty? Perhaps because in their first meeting, the FBI director dropped the Moscow sex allegation on Trump, followed immediately by its publication in the media. It seems entirely reasonable for a president to wonder what was going on and whether the FBI director was loyal, not to the president personally, but to the confidentiality that is required in his role as head of the nation’s chief investigative agency.
A few more things. We had known earlier that Comey briefed Trump about the dossier one-on-one on January 6, 2017. But it was not until an interview Thursday with CNN’s Jake Tapper that Comey revealed the conversation was only about the Moscow sex allegation. The other parts of the dossier — about Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, allegations of collusion — Comey did not mention to the president-elect. No wonder Trump associated the dossier with the Moscow sex story.
We also know, from the new book Russian Roulette, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, that immediately after the first Comey meeting, Trump thought the FBI was blackmailing him:
“Trump had seen this sort of thing before,” they write. “Certainly, his old mentor Roy Cohn — the notorious fixer for mobsters and crooked pols — knew how this worked. So too did Comey’s famous predecessor J. Edgar Hoover, who had quietly let it be known to politicians and celebrities that he possessed information that could destroy their careers in a New York minute.”
Now, some journalists are suggesting that Trump was “obsessed with one particular passage in the dossier” — that is, the “golden showers” scene. Well, why would that be? Could it be that, of all the elements of the dossier, the sex scene was the only one the FBI director chose to tell Trump about in their first meeting?
By the way, we know from Isikoff and Corn and other sources that the dossier’s compilers themselves — former British spy Christopher Steele and the opposition research group Fusion GPS — had little faith in the veracity of the Moscow sex story. Steele once reportedly said there was perhaps a 50-50 chance of the story being true, and Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson considered the Russia source of the story a “big talker” who might have made it up to impress Steele.
But that is the story that the FBI director chose to tell the president on January 6, 2017. It is the story that was leaked and ended up in full public view not long after. And after all that happened, Trump began to question the FBI director’s loyalty. How could he not?
