Former FBI Director James Comey on Thursday sounded like a man who spent a lot of time protecting his independence from political officials in the government.
But his own testimony revealed a surprising lack of interest in using that independence in key moments with top Trump and Obama officials, just when it would have been most useful.
Comey made a big show in his prepared remarks about needing to safeguard his position from President Trump, who tried to convince him to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn.
“My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship,” he said in his prepared remarks.
“That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch,” he said.
But did he exercise that independence? Comey admitted Thursday he spent a lot of time trying to squirm out of confrontations with Trump, and essentially admitted he wasn’t up to the job.
“Maybe if I were stronger, I would have,” he said when asked why he didn’t stand up to Trump more. “I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in.”
When Trump encouraged him to drop the case by saying Flynn is a “good guy,” Comey tried to agree just to end the conversation.
“I remember saying, ‘I agree he’s a good guy’ as a way of saying, ‘I’m not agreeing with what you just asked me to do,'” he explained.
“Again, maybe other people would be stronger in that circumstance, but … that’s how I conducted myself,” Comey added. “I hope I’ll never have another opportunity. Maybe if I did it again I would do it better.”
Comey later described when Trump complained about the “cloud” hanging over his administration because of the Russia probe, and said he told Trump that he would see what he could do. But he said that answer was a way to dodge Trump’s implied request to drop it.
“That was kind of a slightly cowardly way of trying to avoid telling him we’re not going to do that, that I would see what we could do,” he said. “It was a way of kind of getting off the phone frankly.”
And when asked by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., why he didn’t fight back after perceiving Trump as trying to influence the Russia probe, Comey said he flat out didn’t know.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think the circumstances were such that … I was a bit stunned and didn’t have the presence of mind.”
He added that he’s not sure he ever would have said to Trump, “Sir, that’s wrong.”
Comey gave a similar example in a key moment during the Obama administration, when President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, told him not to call the probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails an “investigation.”
Comey said that request made him realize he had to create some separation between the FBI and the Justice Department. But when asked why he didn’t push back against Lynch’s request, Comey said it wasn’t worth fighting.
“This isn’t a hill worth dying on, and so I just said, ‘Okay,'” he said. “The press is going to completely ignore it — and that’s what happened.”
After Comey’s academic interest in the FBI’s independence, one can only hope that his possible replacement, Christopher Wray, is more of a practitioner.
