W
hatever you think of James Comey, it’s hard to argue with this: No unelected official this century has been at the center of so many high-stakes controversies in Washington, D.C., with so many serious consequences for the country.
As deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, Comey squared off against Dick Cheney and senior White House aides over where to draw the line on warrantless wiretaps and secret torture.
In 2016, as FBI director, Comey infuriated Democrats when he decided to give a press conference, lone-wolf-style, to announce that Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic nominee for president, had very likely broken the law by discussing classified work in her private emails, even though she wouldn’t be charged. Months later, on the eve of that election, he returned to the podium to announce that the FBI had found yet more emails and would reopen its investigation into Clinton — a move that may well have gotten Donald Trump elected.
When Comey refused to pledge loyalty to Trump and drop the investigation into Russian interference in the election, Trump fired him. That, of course, ignited a long public feud that’s made Comey, during Trump’s second term, the president’s number-one target for retribution. Last September, Trump’s Justice Department indicted Comey for lying to Congress about whether he authorized leaks related to the Russia probe — an indictment promptly tossed out by a federal court. Then, in April, the administration charged Comey with threatening to kill the president, because he posted a picture of menacing seashells he found on a beach arranged to look like “8647,” as in “get rid of Trump.” (This latest indictment has about as much chance of surviving a day in court as I do of becoming chief justice.)
All of this comes at a moment when Comey is trying to put political life behind him. Since 2023, he’s been pursuing a new career as a prolific writer of legal thrillers, in the Scott Turow vein. His latest novel, Red Verdict, is the fourth one he’s written featuring the fictional prosecutor Nora Carleton, who just happens to work in the same U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan that Comey once led. (It’s also where his daughter Maurene was a top prosecutor until Trump fired her, too; she’s now suing the government.) Comey’s novels are surprisingly engrossing, largely because the fictional characters feel like thin cover for his lived reality. Maybe the Justice Department will find a way to indict him for that.
Comey and I were supposed to meet on the first day of May, but he delayed our interview at the last minute after finding out he was being reindicted for photographing the killer seashells. I was somewhat surprised when he rescheduled just a few weeks later, with the stipulation that he wouldn’t be able to discuss the details of his latest case. We sat outdoors at the Old Angler’s Inn, a historic roadside pub just across the Potomac River from his Virginia home.
This was the first time I’d actually met Comey. Over the years, I’ve heard him described as both a closet Clinton-hater and an avid never-Trumper, and I’ve talked to plenty of lawyers and journalists who regard Comey as an operator and attention hound. Over the course of our 90-minute conversation, though, Comey didn’t come across as any of these things. Arriving without handlers, relaxed in a polo and shades, he seemed comfortable with self-doubt and laughed easily. He gave no hint of evasion. I had the sense of him as a true believer in public service who saw his own duty as being above the realm of politics — but who had nonetheless worked his way into a series of jobs where factoring in the politics wasn’t so much a character flaw as a requirement. It’s not that Comey lacked the political radar to navigate at the highest level of government; it’s more that his own self-image compelled him to ignore the signals. Comey and I talked about Trump, justice, fiction, and regrets.
You spend your life in law enforcement, and then you wake up one day last September and you’ve been indicted. Just walk me through what that’s like.
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it was disorienting. Probably less … what’s the right word? Probably less upsetting for me, and what I mean by that is I know the system. I know what courtrooms are like. I know what processing is like. I know the courts. But maybe in some ways that made it more disorienting to be at the wrong table. When I was sitting there with my lawyers, I really did have this sense of spatial disorientation. I’m at the wrong table. My team should be over there. So that’s what I mean by disorienting. I had a little time. It wasn’t a complete surprise, because I’d heard in the media that they were coming after me. But, yeah, that was my primary reaction. Disorientation, but not as freaked as someone who doesn’t know how the system might be.
Did you think there was a way in which they could actually put your career or your freedom in jeopardy?
No, I did not. Never a doubt. Ultimately, because I fundamentally knew that I was innocent, and the question for me and my team was: So what will be the basis on which this will get dismissed before a trial? And I was keen to have it dismissed as a vindictive prosecution for other people’s benefit. It’s just too bad that it got dismissed on other grounds, because I thought it was important to establish that a president cannot do this, that you cannot target someone for speaking out, for standing up. And we didn’t get to that point. I had complete faith how it was going to end up.
Now, they have this new indictment. I’ve taken to calling it “Jim sees seashells down by the seashore.”
Yeah, say that five times fast.
I’m not the expert you are, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an indictment like that. There’s nothing in it.
Yeah, I’m going to be careful because I’ve promised my friends who are my lawyers that I won’t talk about it, and I think it’s important that I abide the court rules by not talking about it, but I always assumed and I assume it will continue. If not this, there will be something else, because Donald Trump has made clear to his personal lawyers who now lead the Justice Department that this is what he wants, and so it didn’t surprise me, and there will be something else.
Do you have to pay legal fees for all of this, or are your lawyers doing you a favor?
People are volunteering to be part of it, but I do have to pay. It costs me money, and I think, for Trump, he intends that process to be part of the punishment. I’m lucky, compared to a lot of people who’ve just done public service, that I’ve made and saved money. But in the main, they’re contributing their time.
Do you regret taking photos of the seashells?
I’m not going to answer that.
The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, came out in the wake of this indictment and said publicly, “Well, there’s more. There’s more evidence.” That seemed particularly nefarious. I would think that as a prosecutor you’re not supposed to insinuate that you have more evidence about a person when you’ve had the opportunity to lay that evidence out, and there’s no national security reason, I presume, why you can’t. Did that strike you as particularly untoward?
Yeah. I think the most I can say in response to that is that it’s important that all participants respect the court process and abide the local rules not to talk about evidence or legal arguments outside of the courtroom. And so I’m going to do that. I think it’s important that the government do that as well.
So big picture, what do you think the goal of this all is really? It’s not to put you in jail because no one could file that indictment and think that they were going to actually succeed. What’s going on?
I don’t know for sure because it requires me to try to imagine myself inside Donald Trump’s head, but I think his approach to me and to many others — John Brennan, Jim Clapper, Adam Schiff, Letitia James — is, I need to get even with people who have, in his view of the world, come after him, either criticized him or investigated him, and I also need to send a message to others that if you try to come after me, there will be a significant cause.
What if you were a prosecutor tasked with bringing that kind of case on behalf of the president? What would you have done? You’ve been in that position.
One of the most important speeches ever given in Department of Justice history was by Robert Jackson, who was then the attorney general and went on to be on the Supreme Court and the chief Nuremberg prosecutor. But in 1940, as they were getting close to war, he brought all of the federal prosecutors to the Justice Department, to the Great Hall, and he gave this amazing speech about the role of a federal prosecutor, because he was worried about these people. And he essentially said: “Prosecutors can be the most useful force in society, and they can be one of the most dangerous. And what marks the second from the first is picking a person instead of investigating a crime, and don’t ever do that. Don’t ever make decisions for partisan reasons.”
That speech kind of laid dormant in Department of Justice lore. In 1988, Antonin Scalia cited it in a dissent from a case involving the independent-counsel statute, and then everyone talked about it after that. I can remember hearing about the speech when I was an [assistant U.S. attorney] in New York in the late Eighties. It had been given 48 years earlier, but since the late Eighties, the Jackson speech is the — I don’t know what the right word is — life force of the Department of Justice for both Republicans and Democrats. And so I would hope that if I were in a situation where a president I worked for was trying to get me to pursue a person in that way, I would remember that speech and either say no and be fired, or say no and resign, or maybe say no and convince a president that you shouldn’t be acting that way.
It’s like you’re Harrison Ford in that great scene from The Fugitive, where he’s standing on the edge of the cliff and shouts, “I’m innocent!” And Tommy Lee Jones says, “I don’t care!”
And then he jumps off of it.
It seems like they don’t care.
Yeah. I don’t know who the “they” is. I’m sure there’s all kinds of different feelings, but, yeah, it doesn’t seem to me like the leadership of the Department of Justice is living Robert Jackson’s words. They’ve lost the plot, and that’s really bad for lots of reasons, and it’s important that even I not become numb to it. There’s a danger in that, right? “Oh, here comes another indictment.” So we all have to resist becoming numb to it, and it’s going to be really important for the next administration to fix it. That’s something the attorney general did after Watergate.
That’s going to be hard.
I don’t think as hard as people think, though, because, I mean, there’s a danger. I’m too optimistic, but I don’t think so. I think people are going to pour back in.
Provided people want to fix it, right? Because there’s always the danger, particularly in our era, that the low road becomes the new normal, that each party wants to avail itself of the same opportunity to twist and torment the other.
Yeah, there’s a risk of that race to the bottom. I don’t think so here, again, because we’ve done it once before, and in a lot of ways, this era is similar to 50 years ago. I think there are enough people who see just how immoral and dumb it is to have the Justice Department operate as a partisan operation because the shoe will inevitably be on the other foot. Everybody understands why we always depict our statues of justice in blindfolds in this country, because it just can’t work if you’re looking at partisan allegiance, race, creed, wealth, those sorts of things. So those two things come together to give me confidence that it’s not going to be another race to the bottom.
Donald Trump shakes hands with James Comey in the White House on Jan. 22, 2017.
Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images
To be fair, your critics, and critics of the previous administrations, might say, “Why is this any more a politically motivated investigation than the Russia investigation?” Plus, the stuff in the Steele dossier turned out to be not true. Didn’t political investigations begin under other administrations too?
Mistakes were definitely made, people did things they shouldn’t have done. But the whys were explored, and anyone who cares to understand could see that that’s not the department or the FBI acting as a political force trying to accomplish a political goal. We managed to piss off both ends of the political spectrum by trying to do the right thing, in the right way. So I get why people say that, but it requires them to not have looked at inspector-general reports and that sort of thing.
Do people come up to you in public and express support, or anger?
Yeah, because I’m a giraffe, I get recognized.
You’re tall.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous. Haters don’t come up to me, and so I don’t know how many there are out there. The people who speak to me are very supportive.
You clashed with people in the Bush administration over what you thought the law would tolerate and wouldn’t tolerate. Could you have seen anything like this happening under that administration?
No, because what struck me about both George W. Bush and Obama, who are the two other presidents I saw up close, is that they were institutionalists. And maybe they were hiding something from me, but George W. Bush, once I got a chance to talk to him alone and Bob Mueller got a chance to talk to him alone, he wanted to know what the right answer was. And so I can’t imagine the Department of Justice being used in the same way.
This has also affected your family. Your daughter Maurene was fired, and you have a son-in-law who resigned as a federal prosecutor after the first indictment. I would imagine that’s one of the harder pieces of this whole experience.
Yeah, as a parent, you say to yourself, “Say whatever you want about me, but my children? Are you kidding me?” And so, yeah, that was painful to see Maurene fired because she had the poor judgment to choose me as her father, and my son-in-law having to give up his career that he loved, and so, yeah, that’s painful.
Can you sue the president for harassment?
I don’t know. It’s a good question. I’ve seen now in the newspaper that there will be commissions set up to reward money to people who were targeted by the Biden administration. So maybe there’ll be another commission to hand out free money.
I assume you talk to people that are still in the agency or have knowledge about what’s going on inside. What are they feeling inside the FBI?
My strong impression from talking to people is that the organization feels under siege, that they’re shorthanded, they’re under tremendous pressure, and they’re trying to hang on, that they’re counting the days hoping that they don’t get fired or have to quit and can make it to the end of this administration.
Do you know Kash Patel?
No.
Never met him?
Never.
How would you assess his directorship?
Part of what I felt, and I know Bob Mueller felt this way as director, is first of all, you’re always on. Literally, you don’t get vacation — you’re always on in the sense that you’re representing something and people are watching you all the time. So the way that you carry yourself, the way you dress, where you go, who you speak to, all of those things are part of being the director of the FBI. And outside the United States, the identity of the bureau is extraordinary. So you feel a sense of obligation to protect that, and if these stories are true, wow.
It seems like a generation of Americans are sort of being reminded of something we learned in the 1970s, that we have these organizations, the FBI chief among them, that can be turned into nefarious forces and can actually terrorize Americans or violate rights if used the wrong way.
Yeah, and it’s a shame that circumstances force us to stare at that every few generations, but it’s essential. People used to tell me when I was director, “You seem like such a nice person. I trust you.” And I would say, “You shouldn’t trust me. You should ask, ‘How are you overseen?’ ” After I was director for a couple of months, I called Bob Mueller and we were talking about how it’s going, and I said, “You know what I’m struck by is how much autonomy I have, that almost no one knows what I do.” And he said, “Yeah, no shit. That’s why it’s so important to have good people in that role.”
Let’s talk about Red Verdict, which is your fourth Nora Carleton novel. Was it always your ambition to write? Did you have in the back of your mind at some point, “I’ll sit down and write a bunch of novels”?
I never thought I would write fiction. After my first book, A Higher Loyalty, which came out in ’18, I wrote Saving Justice, which came out in January 2021, and they were both story-driven books, and so my agents and editors started saying, “Have you ever thought about writing fiction? Because you write narrative well, you write dialogue well, you have a good eye for detail.” And I said no. And the truth is, this is a stupid thing, but my initial reaction was it’s beneath me somehow — “Come on, I’m a serious person. I don’t write fiction or crime fiction.” Which is kind of a dick thing to think and say, and was wrong.
It’s an audacious move for any male fiction writer, much less a first-time fiction writer, to write a female character.
Yeah, I think it’s fair to say I had a female-dominated household with more girls than boys, and I also knew that my first reader was my wife, who was telling me, “Now you’re missing this, you’re missing that.” And then my other readers were the five kids who all read everything I did before I went out to my circle of friends, and I knew they would tell me. The beauty of my family is if they tell me it’s great, I know they’re not lying.
Some people could say that you’re writing surprisingly woke books. You’ve got a gay woman protagonist and a lot of minority characters.
I’m much cooler than I look. I’ve learned a lot about people’s journeys of sexual identity from my own children.
Now, this being Rolling Stone, I couldn’t help but notice that you quoted a line from Empire Burlesque, the Bob Dylan album: “What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.”
Yeah, one of my favorite lines.
No one knows Empire Burlesque unless they’re a true Dylan fan.
I don’t know much about Bob Dylan’s work, but years ago I saw that line someplace and remembered it. That one stuck in my head.
There’s another quote in the book that really jumped out at me. It said, “As a lawyer on either side, you need to recognize that you could be wrong, that you could be making mistakes or misjudgments, that you may be blind to injustice because of your own biases. But a lot of people can’t handle the cognitive dissonance that produces. So they suppress it under a layer of utter moral certainty.” That’s what a lot of your critics would say about you, right? If there’s a persistent knock over the years in profiles or among your critics, it’s that you think your sense of right and wrong is keener and more essential than other people’s.
Yeah. And I shrug. You can’t see it on the tape. I’ve heard that many times. Nothing I can do about that. I mean, what am I going to do? Anyone who’s worked closely with me knows that’s not true, that I work really hard to doubt, and I believe and I’ve long taught people that doubt is not weakness. Doubt is wisdom. I’ve heard that a million times, that I’m self-righteous, and what am I going to do? Nothing.
Let me go back to the past for a moment. In your first memoir, you revisited the Clinton fiasco. You sort of decided that you did the right thing in difficult circumstances. You’ve had a lot of time since then. Do you still believe that the news conference you gave and the way you handled the Clinton thing, in light of where the country’s been especially, was the right move?
Yes. And people ask me all kinds of time-travel questions. I often say, “So when I get to go back, what do I know?” I’m saying that facetiously because it doesn’t help me. Knowing what I knew then, by and large, they were still the right decisions. The only one I’ve sometimes wondered about is on Oct. 28, should I have dumped it on the attorney general? Should I have just written a memo to the attorney general saying, “We can’t conceal this. We just spent all summer, you included, Madam Attorney General, testifying that we’re done with our investigation. Now, we know we’re not done in a way that the investigators say may change the result. You can’t conceal that, and so you have to speak and tell Congress.” You’ll remember, I tried to hand it to [Loretta Lynch] and by having my chief of staff call her chief of staff and saying, “Here’s what he thinks he has to do, but he would welcome a conversation with her,” and the answer came back saying she disagrees, but she does not wish to speak with him. I knew then what that was. That was, “You’ll take this hit.”
James Comey at his home in McLean, Virginia, on Tuesday, May 19, 2025.
Matt Eich for Rolling Stone
This is when the information had been taken off Anthony Weiner’s computer and it was now clear that there were more emails you had to go through.
All of a sudden there are 300,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. And most important to the team was we can see BlackBerry.net emails, which were from the beginning of her tenure as secretary of state, and we had never found any of those. And if there was going to be material evidence about her intent, which was at the core of this, where would it be? It would likely be at the beginning, when someone said, “You can’t use your email for this kind of thing.” So my team’s telling me, “We have to reopen this investigation.” Got hundreds of thousands of emails, got the BlackBerry emails. We don’t know what they say because we haven’t gotten a warrant yet. We can’t review them before the election and the result may change, and if you just spent all summer testifying, “We’re done, go away, we’re done, there’s nothing here, go away,” what do you do with that? And even as painful as it’s been, with the benefit of hindsight, you can’t conceal that. I mean one of the norms that the FBI exists under is a duty of candor, especially when you testify. And so both doors led to hell, but you couldn’t choose the concealed door. The only thing I’ve asked myself is should I have just dumped it on her? Would have been better for me personally.
For you personally.
Yeah. Write a memo that says, “This isn’t a close call, Madam Attorney General. You got to inform Congress that our testimony is incorrect.” I thought about that at the moment, and I thought, “That’s a chicken-shit way to operate. If this is what you believe, then you should take the hit, especially if she’s refusing to talk to you.” But it’s been painful enough over the last 10 years that sometimes I fantasize about going back and writing the memo, and I probably still wouldn’t do it because it still feels chicken shit to me, but, yeah. There are plenty of people who are walking around, maybe even Secretary Clinton, thinking that I cost her the presidency. I was going into a CVS, like, six months ago, and a lady, a little older than I, walking out the other way, and she looks up at me and says, “Oh, you’re the reason we have Donald Trump.” And then walks past me. I’m like, “Well, good morning to you, lady.”
Well, let me ask you this: What if you did have a time machine, and you could go back knowing everything you know now? We’ve had 10 years of Donald Trump, but maybe, just maybe, the election goes differently if you handle the inflection points of that year differently.
Obviously as you think about what’s happened to America over these 10 years, it requires probably more reflection than you might imagine. But look, one of my very best people was a woman named Trisha Anderson, and she was the deputy general counsel for National Security, and she asked the best question, that I’ve thought about many times since. When we were debating what to do in late October, she said, “Should you consider that what you’re about to do may help elect Donald Trump president of the United States?” It kind of sucked the air out of the room. I said, “First, Trisha, thank you. Thank you for that question. I’m so glad that I have an environment where someone is going to ask that question. But the answer has to be no, because down that path lies the death of the FBI as an independent institution.” You can’t have the FBI director picking who is president.
That’s fair. Have you seen Hillary Clinton?
No, I’ve never met Hillary Clinton.
You’ve not even met her?
No, never, ever.
You’ve written about the childhood trauma you had, the neighborhood rapist who held you and your brother captive. It seems to have been a defining moment in your life, as it would be for anyone. Is it something you still work through? Have you had therapy to deal with something like that?
Yeah, that’s a great question. My parents were, I think it’s fair to say, classic sort of Irish Catholic, we joke and we move on kind of people. I can remember my father awakening me the day after this happened, shaking me awake to tell me that my brother was outside speaking to the media and I was going to miss all these interviews, so get up and get out there. He was being funny, but he was trying to find a way to deal with this. But mostly, it was “Don’t acknowledge it.” It was such a big deal. That was a Friday night, and Monday in school, all seven periods, every class I was in was devoted entirely to me going to the front of the room and telling the story.
No way.
All seven periods … math, science. And then I told the story over and over again throughout high school, and then I would tell it in college constantly, and my friends would have me tell it, truth be told, at a party we were hosting at a dorm, when the girls were going to leave. “Get Comey to tell the story.” But what I can now see happened to me is that that’s very healthy, that constant recalling, recounting, restoring, right? It’s cognitive behavioral therapy, and I think it landed me in a much healthier place accidentally than I ever would have been otherwise. And so it’s an important part of my life, but I’ve managed to reframe it as a gift to me in a lot of ways. I mean it did a couple of things, but most importantly, it made me realize how short life is and helped me. I don’t know whether my brother’s been able to process it in the same way. He seems healthy, but interestingly, we’ve never talked about how we processed it.
So what’s your plan for the next 10 to 15 years? Do you want to write a dozen more books? Do you want to teach? Do politics?
Zero possibility, ever. Yeah, that’s not my thing. That I can say with high confidence. What I want to have at the center of my life is being a grandfather.
How many grandchildren do you have?
Five, and I watch some of them at least two days a week, all day with my wife, and we return them after dinner, to help my kids. And that is the most important thing I do, honestly. I think I’ll write some more fiction, and I have in mind a nonfiction project. I heard another fiction author describe himself as a socially adept introvert, and that’s what I am, and so what I love about writing is, yeah, I can do it alone. I don’t have to talk to other people, and so if I can interact with just my family and close friends and write, that’d be pretty cool. So that’s what I’d like really the rest of my life to be about. To be a father, grandfather, and then do some writing, because I enjoy doing it.
And stay out of jail.
Oh, obviously stay out of jail.
I was struck reading your first memoir that you were still so optimistic about the future, and I felt the same at that time. This is what, 10 years ago, and your feeling was the system will hold, the institutions will hold, this country has weathered worse. And I wonder, are you still that optimistic?
Yeah, I am. It’s been tested by the wisdom of the American people returning Donald Trump to the Oval Office, but I am. Because of probably a slightly darker influence than a more positive influence. The darker influence is I have a decent sense of American history and just how screwed up we’ve been so many times, and I’m always reminding people that I’m now a boring old guy, that the country was coming apart when I was a kid. The president was murdered, Dr. King was murdered, Malcolm X was murdered, president’s brother was murdered, cities burned to the ground. Oh, my God, America’s over. No, it’s not, and so we’ve been through that journey a lot of times, and I think the rhythm of history tells me that America is going to be OK. And then second, I see in young people a passion that keeps me afloat. And so I really do think we’re staring at a U-turn ahead.
I hope that’s true. Increasingly, I feel like things are getting broken that we’ve never tried to rebuild in terms of our place in the world, our leadership in the world, our moral example, our ethical aspirations. Yes, we’ve had violence. Yes, we’ve had downturns and injustice, but it feels like we’re unleashing forces that are hard to reverse.
Yeah, maybe. Just trying to imagine the future that Donald Trump has just created with his blundering in the Persian Gulf, the knock-on effects of that, I don’t know. But America will recover. I mean at least in my lifetime, we will recover, and I envy my daughter and son-in-law their opportunity to go back — because I won’t go back — but to go back into government and be part of that rebuilding. It’s going to be cool.