Outside the theater where former FBI director James Comey’s live podcast taping with New Yorker editor David Remnick is about to begin on a chilly Thursday night, two women rehashed Savannah Guthrie’s Comey interview and agreed it was worth seeing him live. Another, a few steps away, told me how much. Tickets to this live taping, to see these two men on stage talking under a dramatic spotlight, ranged from $75 to $100, she said, and they’d sold. She was lucky to get in off the waitlist.
The audience, mostly white, middle-aged and wearing fussy glasses and accent scarves, found their seats. A vendor hawked concessions: “You’re going to get hungry waiting for impeachment!” Before long, Remnick and then Comey took the stage—Comey, ever the anti-Mueller, in a lilac shirt, blue blazer, gray slacks, and stylish black boots—to a flurry of applause.
The topic at hand: “a story driven book that, in a way, tricks people into reading a leadership book without their knowing,” as Comey described his not-quite-memoir A Higher Loyalty. It’s also, he admitted, an unburdening “in a sense,” an explanation of how and why he made certain decisions that may never be forgiven in a crowd like this one.
Their on-stage, on-air analysis did dissolve, as the book also does, into descriptions of Donald Trump’s various attributes. “Cheeto-like,” Remnick calls him, adding Comey would have too, “If you’d had a decent editor,” to boisterous laughter and applause. But Comey has more soulful critiques, too: He does not dislike the president, he told his disbelieving host, but he does “feel sorry for him” on a spiritual level.
“I think he has an emptiness inside of him, and a hunger for affirmation, that I’ve never seen in an adult,” he said. Trump’s drive for power, “It’s all, What will fill this hole?” Indeed Comey had planned, not least because of the president’s deficient morality and the leadership vacuum in his administration, to remain in office.
The interview veered toward Christopher Steele’s dossier, which Comey said he considered credible when he saw it six months before his firing, as a “series of reports from a credible person with a reliable track record and a known experience and source network in Russia,” he said. “It was something to be taken seriously.” He doesn’t believe it any more or less now than he did then, he told Remnick, adding that he hadn’t been able to follow its internal corroboration since his firing. Asked whether he thinks the Russian government has something on the president, however, he said: “I think it’s possible.”
Among Comey’s most consistent arguments were his defenses, in sometimes emotional terms, of his decision to notify the voting public of the FBI’s reopened email investigation just 11 days before the 2016 election. Remnick pressed him with protests, and Nate Silver’s findings, that he’d robbed Clinton of the presidency. Transparency drove the decision, without which, “We will not have earned and retained the public’s trust,” Comey said.
“You had to know there’d be a political effect,” insisted Remnick, incredulous, while bitter murmurs and scoffs bubbled up from the audience. “Do you feel any ownership about the 2016 election and its result?”
“I feel tremendous pain,” Comey said, adding that he still puzzled over what words—better than “extremely careless”—he should have used to describe Clinton’s handling of classified emails: “Really sloppy?” (“But that sounds worse!” breathed a white-haired man behind me, evidently overcome.)
But, he said, no definitive proof his letter to Congress caused Trump’s victory over Clinton would make him reconsider his decision. “I hope that’s not true,” he said of the causation, widely believed by Democrats. But, even if it were, “It wouldn’t change how I think about the decision that I’ve made.”
One of Remnick’s last questions to Comey—”What do you say to people who voted for him?”—elicits a hissing “Yesss!” from a woman behind me.
“I understand about the pain in the states that voted for Donald Trump around globalization and dislocation and all the challenges those communities are facing—I get that,” he said, “but there’s something above that that is more important.” He asked the Trump supporters out there, as if there were any, to ask themselves, “What did your forebears fight and die for?” It was, “a set of values, which is all we are at the end of the day.”
Maybe he’s right about the danger of an impeachment deepening divisions in the country, that “It will lock in our dysfunction and our pride when what we need is a moment of clarity.” (Even so, he says, it may prove constitutionally inevitable: “Impeachment is a process laid out in our Constitution and so decisions about whether to pursue that should be about the law and the founders.”) Because the grumbling in this audience tells me he’s onto something when he warns there may be no way back to those higher principles, the moral lodestar we’ve all lost sight of but which Comey still sees.
Till we find it again, he’s guiding us instead apparently. With a message that we’re all a little bit to blame for its loss, and that with Trump’s impeachment—the easy way out—we’d only lose it further still. His resolve appears to pay off, at least in some of this audience’s eyes. The first few rows gave him a standing ovation. And the waitlisted ticket holder, for one, said afterward that she was convinced now of his moral leadership, that he’d done the right thing even in telling Congress and the public about Clinton’s extremely careless correspondence. It must be working: He’s confessed, and come out spotless.
