Schmidt S. - Donald Trump V. the United States - Inside the Struggle to Stop a President

She was upset, and he was losing his patience. He paused and told her that if the bureau said nothing about what it had found, that would almost certainly arouse the anger and suspicion of the Republican Congress and that instead of a single painful event he would be hauled before committees on Capitol Hill from then until the election.

“There will be hearings all frickin’ summer that are not going to be fair to Hillary Clinton,” he told her. “We need to end it, we need to end it credibly, and we need to put it to bed. So rather than have it drip, drip, drip, I can control the story and get it out there in a way that’s best for everybody.”

Not best for everybody, Patrice thought. They both had their priorities. He said he was concerned about the FBI, and she said she was concerned about him. He understood her position but for once didn’t find it very helpful. He was reaching to her for something, but in a way he was already beyond her help.

“Why do you have to step out and get shot?” she pleaded. “Why you?”

Acknowledging the impasse, they both fell silent.

“You’re going to get slammed,” she finally said.

—

A few days later, on July 4 weekend, with several of their kids and their significant others coming into town for the holiday, the house seemed more like a hostel than a home. In the room Jim used as an office, his daughter’s boyfriend slept on a futon. A blanket was tacked to the frame around the glass doors to the office to keep the sun out. Two of their daughters—and one of their husbands—bunked on air mattresses in the basement. The other children were in bedrooms upstairs. Although Jim was preoccupied with his plans for the following week’s press conference, the family still made sure to continue an annual Comey family tradition.

Since the children were young, Jim would assign each family member a section of the Declaration of Independence to read aloud on the Fourth of July.

Patrice would typically read the first paragraph, Jim the last, and the rest would be divided up among the kids. “I thought when the kids started to move out and live on their own, it would fade away, but they were like, ‘What, Dad?’ ” Jim said.

As the kids added partners, they too were assigned sections. Those children who were elsewhere for the holiday would call or use FaceTime.

“What I do is give out these pieces,” Jim said. “The new sons-in-law get the crappy pieces.”

Through the barbecues and dinners that weekend, Jim closely monitored final tweaks his aides were making to his remarks. He wanted to maintain eye contact with the camera, and so he would memorize the speech. But the house was so crowded that there was no place for him to sit alone to work on it. So, over the weekend, as Americans celebrated the birth of the nation with hot dogs and fireworks, and Clinton headed back onto the campaign trail after being interviewed by FBI agents and federal prosecutors at the bureau’s headquarters, Jim took a beach chair and parked himself alone in the driveway. Sitting behind a gate the FBI had installed as a safety measure—in the ten- to fifteen-foot gap between his house and the neighbor’s—Jim recited the speech to himself over and over again, practicing for what he thought would be the most important public moment of his life.

How had he gotten to this point, to this feeling that the director of the FBI would personally and publicly need to explain the agency’s secret deliberations, in the most high-profile way imaginable? And where had this strange sense of personal destiny come from? From the vantage point of what was to come, Patrice’s sense of foreboding was well placed. But from childhood, Comey had been seized with the conviction that the world was a dangerous place and that only principled individuals can make a difference.

Comey grew up in Yonkers, New York, where his grandfather was the police chief. He was late to grow and got bullied a lot, which was a formative experience. Instead of playing sports, he sang in the choir and stocked shelves at the local grocery store. When he was sixteen, he started carrying around a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson in his wallet: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

A kid that earnest and that alone starts looking at the world differently, and Jim developed a code about the proper way that people should be treated. He started questioning his Catholic upbringing and what he perceived as the hierarchical—and often hypocritical—structure of the religion. He would struggle in the years to come with questions about whether God existed. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that there is a divine force that plays a role in human history, answers prayers, and intervenes. And he couldn’t reconcile the concept of a loving God with reality, given the awfulness and tragedy of so much of human experience. It just wasn’t logical.

The parts of Christianity that he didn’t have any problem embracing were the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was a radical, and that excited Jim. Not God-made man, but a human, born to a husband and wife, and executed by the government for his radicalism. Jim didn’t believe the theology surrounding the biblical Jesus, but he found his call to live for other people to be profound. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me; love your neighbor as yourself —those ideas made sense. Jim found them to be wholesome, logical, and important.

So you might say that he approached spirituality like a lawyer. And just as the canon of laws provided a code for how best to treat each other, and influence human behavior, so too did the Bible. It was solid, he thought. You could organize a stable and principled society around those ideas. And without such a robust code for mankind, went Comey’s civic theology, we are lost.

I have a very dark view of humans, Jim would come to think. People are capable of so much that is awful and are dominated by biases and insecurities that drive to do awful things, especially in groups. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was central to his evolving idea of justice, because Niebuhr argued that to combat the evil in the world, good people needed to actively build and maintain a system to protect themselves from one another. The best you can hope for in human existence is to achieve something short of love, which is justice.

Jim thought the law, more than any other profession, had a direct hand in seeking justice, so he chose that path.

As a young lawyer in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan—the most prestigious office in the country—he prosecuted mobsters, fraudsters, terrorists, and gangsters from the mid-80s to the early 90s. He loved the work and the meritocratic nature of the office.

“The only relevant question was, ‘How good are you at your job?’ ” Jim recalled. “It was like picking sides for a pickup basketball game; you care only about picking the best squad.”

Jim noticed that the higher he rose in the Justice Department, the more he became disillusioned with political appointees above him who often looked at decisions through the lens of what it meant to their party. Whenever they were confronted with a difficult situation, too many political officials’ first instinct was to ask, “How does this look?” and “What can be said about this?” Only later would they ask, “What’s true?”

As deputy attorney general in the administration of George W. Bush, Comey saw flagrant examples of this impulse up close, which only darkened his view of politics. In the spring of 2004, he was forced to tilt against Vice President Dick Cheney, to prevent the White House from pushing the ailing and hospitalized attorney general, John Ashcroft, to sign off on a legally dubious surveillance program.