James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

James Comey Opens Up About Ego, Distrust and More

The former F.B.I. director was interviewed for “The Daily” podcast. Here are five takeaways from the conversation.

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James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, spoke with me for Friday’s episode of “The Daily,” as he wraps up a publicity tour for his book, “A Higher Loyalty.” Our conversation focused on his decision, before his firing, to document his interactions with President Trump in a series of memos — and to eventually share the contents of one of those memos with a journalist, in the hopes of pressuring the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel in the Russia investigation.

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Listen to ‘The Daily’: James Comey on Ego, Distrust and More

In an interview with Michael Barbaro, the former F.B.I. director explains his decision to make public his notes of his interactions with President Trump.

Here are five takeaways from the interview.

I started the interview where Mr. Comey begins his book — actually before he begins his book, in the author’s note, with a strikingly candid observation about his own personality. “All people have flaws and I have many,” he wrote. “Some of mine, as you’ll discover in this book, are that I can be stubborn, prideful, overconfident and driven by ego.”

It seemed like his decision to itemize his own shortcomings before recounting his role in the investigation of Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump over the past two years might be an acknowledgment that those flaws help explain his conduct. But Mr. Comey quickly rejected the idea that his ego had played a role in how he managed the investigation into Mr. Trump.

He conceded, instead, that it might have influenced how he treated the inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server — in particular his unusual news conference, in July 2016, condemning how she had handled classified government emails as “extremely careless.”

It was his own children, he said, who had told him that the news conference was flawed, because he dwelled for so long on Mrs. Clinton’s misdeeds, before finally — and suspensefully — announcing he would not charge her with any crime. They called that delayed delivery of the most important information “Seacresting.”

In their mind, he had acted like Ryan Seacrest, as host of “American Idol,” seemingly prepared to announce a singer’s elimination or victory, but first taking a long, unwanted commercial break. “I think that criticism is actually valid,” he told me. “The reason I associate it with ego is I think I thought I knew the right way to do it and in hindsight,” he said, “I don’t think I did.”

[Read a transcript of the interview from the episode.]

Mr. Comey said his ritual of writing memos about conversations with Mr. Trump began after a meeting inside Trump Tower on Jan. 6, 2017 — but not because Mr. Trump, then president-elect, had said something especially alarming. Instead, Mr. Comey said, from the very first moments of their relationship, he believed Mr. Trump could not be trusted.

“I knew I was communicating with someone who might not tell the truth about it if it ever became an issue,” Mr. Comey said. From that point on, Mr. Comey decided to document his one-on-one interactions with the new president in case there was ever any question about what had transpired during such sessions.

“Normally I wasn’t even much of a note taker,” he said. “But here I thought given those factors that I would need a detailed account in the event I need to draw on it in the future.” Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

I asked Mr. Comey why, after his firing in May 2017, he had deliberately shared the contents of one of his memos with a reporter, in the hopes of producing news coverage that would alarm the public about Mr. Trump’s conduct and therefore prompt the appointment of a special counsel.

Why did he decide to work outside the justice system, rather than within it? His reply was blunt: He did not trust the leaders of the Justice Department, including the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to effectively and fairly carry out such an investigation themselves.

In his mind, Mr. Sessions would soon be recused from the Russia investigation, rendering him ineffectual, and Mr. Rosenstein had shown himself to be untrustworthy because of his role in firing Mr. Comey.

It was Mr. Rosenstein who had written a memo to the president laying out the reasons Mr. Comey should be fired. “I did not have confidence that it would be done in the right way,” Mr. Comey said.

“My plan was to stay,” Mr. Comey told me, when I asked if he wished he were still the director of the F.B.I. He might have eventually been fired over a different clash with Mr. Trump, he said. But as attacks on the F.B.I. have mounted, including from the president, Mr. Comey said, his desire to protect the agency has grown.

These days, he said, he tries to read about 20 pieces of mail a day from current and former F.B.I. agents, who write to him about their experience.

“I could only read them about 20 at a time before I got a pain in my chest from their sadness and my sadness of not being with them,” he said. “Reading about their grief, which reflects my grief, is the hardest part.”

During his book tour, Mr. Comey has described Mr. Trump as morally unfit for the office of the presidency — a profoundly damning judgment from a former director of the F.B.I. I wondered whether Mr. Comey feared that his comments risked further politicizing the bureau at a time when it is the subject of intense scrutiny.

“I worry a little bit,” he said. But his goal, he said, is to prompt a conversation that will ultimately benefit the F.B.I. and the country.

I asked what, exactly, that conversation is. “Most broadly,” he said, “I’d like to have a conversation about what are the values at the core of this country and about our expectations that our leaders reflect those values? And encourage people to rise above their partisan passions, their policy passions and realize that without that collection of values and without leaders who are tethered to those values and held accountable by us to those values, we’re lost.”


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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Big Egos, Politics And Lack Of Trust. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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