Comey and Confirmation Bias: A Review

The Dungeon Review of:

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, by James Comey

Confirmation bias. “When people would like a certain idea/concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true.” Psychology Today, April 2015

If you are among the die-hard Donald Trump supporters who are certain James Comey is out to get the president by taking cheap shots in a tell-all book, you can stop right here, and leave the room. This review is not for you.

If you are among the die-hard Never-Trumpers who are certain James Comey was railroaded out of office and that his book is a righteous swing at a bully, you, too, can stop right here and leave the room. This review is not for you.

Fairly or unfairly, I have a tendency to judge memoirists in large part by the books they read, the authors they learned from, the philosophers they quote and cling to. I want to know what distant voices of reason, logic, and passion they have heard, and how they have been informed by the lessons those voices try to teach decades, centuries, even millennia later.

I also want to know something of the permeability of the memoirist’s thought processes, and whether their brains are sponges or stones. As they were growing and maturing, did they welcome and take in myriad, often differing, ideas, and did they absorb those ideas? Or did they put up impenetrable barriers to incoming information and stand rock-like against contrary thoughts?

It is important for me as a reader to know whether a memoirist had a life of profound and hard lessons, a life replete with challenges, flaws, failures, and hard-won successes. And, in the face of all those circumstances and outcomes, did he or she know enough to credit the right people upon whose shoulders they would eventually stand?

Can I read into the memoir selflessness, compassion, accountability, responsibility, humility, and contrition where contrition is called for?

And, finally, does the memoir convince me of the author’s faithfulness to the truth of his or her story—would the story stand up for itself in the long run under any condition—or is it a story of self-serving convenience with the life expectancy of a mayfly?

James Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, checks off most of the positive boxes I expect to see checked in a serious memoir. There are a few negative boxes checked, but they don’t, in my opinion, reduce the value of the book as a faithful, instructive, narrative of one man’s life and career.

In his Author’s Note, Comey writes, “Ethical leaders do not run from criticism, especially self-criticism, and they don’t hide from uncomfortable questions. They welcome them. All people have flaws and I have many. Some of mine…are that I can be stubborn, prideful, overconfident, and driven by ego. I’ve struggled with those my whole life.”

A bit farther down he continues, “Those leaders who never think they are wrong, who never question their judgments or perspectives, are a danger to the organizations and people they lead. In some cases, they are a danger to the nation and the world.” These comments come even before we are into the book proper. He sets a high bar for ethical leadership, announces his own flaws as a person and a leader, and then holds out the example of what can go wrong when society accepts an unquestioning, and unquestioned, leader. In the pages that follow, Comey attempts to balance his acknowledged ethical and moral imperfections against the weight of the ethical and moral decisions—right or wrong—he makes during the long arc of his career.

It is important to say here that this is not a book about James Comey vs. Donald Trump. It just isn’t. The video clips, the interviews, the talking head rants on the left and right, the political position-taking and offenses and outrage alleged on the Hill are inconsequential distractions in one sense, and questionable book salesmanship on the other. And I do hold Comey accountable for that.

This post-publication world of theater and high dudgeon pits Comey advocates who believe Comey’s mission is to drive a lance of justice deep into Trump’s soulless heart against the righteous indignation of Trump supporters who view their leader as supreme and above reproach from a failed and fallen man. In my opinion, neither side would ever get past the final 64 pages of the book’s 279 pages where Comey finally meets Trump and then details his ultimate, and fruitless, fight against the president’s political, moral, and ethical vacuum.

To the Comey lovers, and the Comey haters, those last few pages are all they need to justify their confirmation bias. And that’s unfortunate, because the main body of the book—easily the first four-fifths—sheds light on man of similar proportions (other than height) to most Americans in terms of background, hopes, dreams, aspirations, flaws, failures, sorrows, and successes.

Earlier, I said I have a tendency to judge memoirists by the books they read, the authors they learned from, and the philosophers they quote and cling to. Comey’s choices of quotes leading into his chapters tells us something worthwhile about his ethical foundations, and where he is likely to go with the arc of the book. Comey leads his introduction with this quote by the 20th century protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” If you know anything about Niebuhr, you then know where Comey is going to go…where he is ethically compelled to go. As high and just as our aspirations may be, we are flawed and require an ethical framework to keep our flaws in check while we reach for the heights.

It should come as no surprise—though when I read it, I was very pleased for personal reasons—that Comey would also embrace one of the most important Niebuhr-inspired documents relating to American religious and political ethics, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail which Comey correctly judges to be about “…seeking justice in a deeply flawed world.” Comey writes that he encouraged all FBI employees to read Letter from Birmingham Jail. I get that. I’ve been an advocate for making Letter from Birmingham Jail a must-read for every high school civics, government, and English class.

Comey notes that shortly after he began his duties as the FBI’s director, he asked his training division to create a new King-based component into the FBI Academy’s training curriculum in order to impress on FBI agents and analysts the scope and methods of the treacherous misadventures the FBI undertook to defame and destroy the Civil Rights leader. Over time Comey also sought to address the vastly uneven disparity between white and non-white employees by new outreach programs to encourage greater minority employment among agents and analysts.

One of Comey’s chapter quotes, this from Benjamin Disraeli, struck home to me as someone who endured bullying, “Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.” It is in this chapter, aptly titled “The Bully,” Comey writes about growing up in Yonkers, New York, and Allendale, New Jersey during the critical adolescent-to-early-teen years that inflate bullies with the oxygen of hate and suffocate kids who are emotionally and/or physically vulnerable.

It’s hard to imagine the 6’ 8” Comey as a target of bullies, but, as he puts it, “My parents were always trying to save money, so my mother cut her boys’ hair with her own electric clippers and dressed us in clothes she purchased at a Sears outlet. My pants were too short, and I wore white socks and heavy-soled black shoes to support the fallen arches in my huge feet. I didn’t know it, but it turns out I had a New York accent different from the kids in Allendale. I stuck out like a sore thumb.”

It is also a chapter in which Comey says he became aware of the good people in his life—adult mentors like his English teacher, Andy Dunn, and, most significantly, grocer Harry Howell, for whom Comey worked as a stock boy. Of Howell, Comey writes, “I still think Harry Howell was one of the finest bosses I have ever had. This was in part because he loved his job and was proud of his work.”

While Comey endured bullying at school, at work he saw in Howell the bully’s antithesis, writing of his grocery boss, “Those years of bullying added up, minor indignity after indignity, making clear the consequences of power. Harry Howell had power, and he wielded it with compassion and understanding. That wasn’t easy for him, because he had to deal with a lot of immature kids. Others had power, like the bullies at school, and they found it far easier to wield it against those who were defenseless and to just go along with the group rather than stand up to it.”

In a striking denouement to his tales of being bullied, Comey turns the tables on himself and discusses, with an appropriate measure of shame, his own venture into the bully’s world as a willing participant in a mean-spirited scheme to trash the room and belongings of a fellow William & Mary student in 1978. More than just a college prank, it was an act of random violence against another person that has, according to Comey, stayed with him for four decades. In his account of the trashing—and his realization that he had become one of the crowd, not apart from it, Comey recalls a quote of Ralph Waldo Emerson that he recited at his high school graduation and carried in his wallet since he was 16. “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.”

Many memoirs have a love story woven into them and Comey’s love story with his wife Patrice is worth a book in its own right. There is so much of Patrice in the book…even when she is not mentioned…that I actually went back and re-read the book to go over the earlier chapters to tease out her influence on Comey’s writing and on his worldview expressed in later chapters. There is much happiness in the Comey’s relationship and unqualified love in their family, but there is also terrible sadness, a loss no parent can imagine, a loss that tears many couples apart.

What is clear is that the Comey’s are partners in every sense of the word—marital, parental, and extending into critical decisions about job moves and career support in the face of great doubt. Comey describes a life-threatening event that occurred when he was visiting his then-girlfriend Patrice, at the time a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Comey contracted malaria, and Patrice slung him over her motorcycle in the middle of the night and got Comey to a remote hospital in time to be treated. In light of that near-death experience, and the subsequent nightmare visited on the Comeys years later, he writes, “But sometimes it isn’t when we face death ourselves, but rather when death takes away those we love the most, that we really learn about just how short our time on earth is and why what we do with that time matters.”

The themes of death, loss, and inexplicable human trial undergird so much of Comey’s book. This framework is perhaps best depicted when Comey, after 9/11, invited the country’s 92 chief federal prosecutors to join him at Ground Zero. His goal was to encourage them to find a way to “…ensure that something good comes from suffering, that we find some kind of gift in good-bye. Not to somehow, perversely, make the loss ‘worth it’…in that mission lie the beauty and genius of our justice system.”

The book winds its way through the Cosa Nostra and its mob bosses big and small, the brutality of mafia killings, and the bizarre dark humor of appropriate forms of murdering a fellow made man. Comey introduces us to the finer federal art of bringing to justice celebrities like Martha Stewart who, writes Comey, could have just come clean on her insider-informed stock sales and paid a pittance of a fine…but, she committed the ultimate FBI sin: she lied. 

Comey opens his chapter, "The Easy Lie," with this quote from Jefferson: “He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world believing him. The falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.”

Now the book begins to hint at, foreshadow, lift the veil just a smidge, on the battle of wills that scripts the final act of the play. But Comey is careful still, barely midway through the memoir, to not put his thumb on the reader’s scale of interest in the larger trajectory of Comey’s story. That story arc is much more than Comey v. Trump, and the potential reader is advised to stick to the plot at hand, to not skip ahead (which, as if it needed to be said in the wake of Comey’s many on-air interviews, has been badly—and somewhat inaccurately—spoiled by many pot-stirring chefs).

In this midsection, Comey does a reasonable job of laying the groundwork for his image as a man of trust by recounting a routine he exercised during his tenure as the United States Attorney in Manhattan. He describes what he called a “reservoir of trust,” in his meetings with incoming prosecutors when they took their oaths of office. He writes, “I told them that something remarkable was going to happen when they stood up and said they represented the United States of America—total strangers were going to believe what they said next.” Whether it was truly prescient at the time, or simply the wishful, retrospective thinking of the memoirist, Comey concludes his reservoir of trust analogy with this: “I would explain that the problem with reservoirs is that they take a very long time to fill but they can be drained by one hole in the dam. The actions of one person can destroy what it took hundreds of people years to build.”

The balance of the book leading up to January 7, 2017, when Comey met president-elect Trump for the first time, details Comey’s interactions with George W. Bush’s White House, including White House counsel David Addington, the often-futile battles he engaged in with Vice-President Richard Cheney, Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzales and the CIA over the matter of “enhanced interrogations”—torture. 

Uncomfortable with the sketchy legalese used to justify torture techniques—notably waterboarding—Comey pushed back against torture advocates who were certain such methods were yielding actionable intelligence. Writes Comey, “Then and now, leaders feel a special pressure to be certain, a pressure that reinforces their natural confirmation bias. Of course, in a healthy organization, doubt is not weakness, it is wisdom, because people are at their most dangerous when they are certain that their cause is just and their facts are right.”

In what may be one of Comey’s most trenchant comments, he says, “The Constitution and the rule of law are not partisan political tools. Lady Justice wears a blindfold. She is not supposed to peek out to see how her political master wishes her to weigh a matter.”

Comey lost his battles with the Bush White House, and left the Justice Department in 2005, returning to the private sector in Connecticut until 2013 when then-Attorney General Eric Holder asked Comey to interview for the job of FBI Director. Comey’s reluctance to uproot his family once again was overruled by Patrice—despite her own commitments to graduate school and work at a mental health clinic in Bridgeport. Public service was too great an obligation to dismiss, and Comey moved back to Washington (his family stayed in Bridgeport for two more years) after a series of interviews with the new president, Barack Obama.

Comey and his wife had initially been skeptical of the possibility of Comey’s being picked by a Democrat president, but during his first meeting with Obama, Comey writes that he thought there was a good chance he’d be selected. According to Comey, Obama said, “I don’t want help from the FBI on policy. I need competence and independence. I need to sleep at night knowing the place is well run and the American people protected.” Comey writes that after the interview, he agreed to the nomination, following up with yet another prophetic thought: “…I fully intended to serve as director of the FBI through the year 2023. What, I wondered, could possibly interfere with that?”

From this point on in the book, Comey begins laying a more coherent and narrowing, path toward what would become his engagement with, and dismissal by, Donald Trump less than four years after being sworn in as the FBI’s seventh director. It is here that Comey brings outgoing FBI chief Robert Mueller into the picture during Comey’s breaking-in period, and details the work habits and culture of the FBI Comey was beginning to lead.

As mentioned earlier, Comey was struck by the lopsided racial demographics of FBI employees—83 percent of the special agents were non-Hispanic Caucasians, according to Comey. He reflected on the diversity divide with one of his daughters, who replied, “The problem, Dad, is that you are The Man. Who wants to work for The Man?” 

Over the next three years Comey’s efforts to attract more non-white agents and analysts to the FBI began to pay off. He writes, “During my third year at the FBI, a huge new-agent class at Quantico was 38 percent nonwhite. Our standards hadn’t changed; we were just doing a better job of showing people the life they could make by joining us, which is contagious in a positive way.” Contagious Optimism would also be an excellent sub-title for Comey’s book.

Comey also introduces Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, “…each intelligent and personable lawyers and I liked them both.” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who would play a pivotal role in the Comey-Trump contretemps is also brought into the story as Comey describes his growing relationships with the Justice Department’s leadership.

As Comey approaches 2016, he details his concerns and actions taken in the growing wake of gun violence and white-on-black confrontations—notably the deaths of black boys or men shot or otherwise killed by white police officers. Think Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray. And that pendulum of violence often swung the other way, as police officers found themselves under attack. At one point, Comey sums up his frustration, writing, “I had felt the pain and anger of black communities since Ferguson, and now I could feel the pain and anger of law enforcement. Police officers didn’t feel safe or appreciated on streets they were trying to protect, and communities didn’t trust the police.”

There is a moment when Comey, after delivering a speech on the dilemma facing the police and the communities they protect, is called to the White House to meet President Obama and discuss—or, as Comey puts it, listen back and forth—what the impact of his speech may have had on the black community. The president raises points Comey had not considered from a black man’s perspective, and the session ends with Comey somewhat chastened, but somewhat wiser, by his account.

For the balance of this chapter, and the one to follow—aptly titled, "Road Kill"—Comey delves into the mysteries of computer encryption, notably the desire of companies like Apple to so deeply encrypt their products that law enforcement would be unable to use potentially-incriminating data contained in those products in court. His ruminations over the conflict between justice and privacy, the courts and data-encrypting corporations, lead to accounts of the theft of government data by hackers and spies. All groundwork for the most troublesome period of his career—the sticky matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

From this point on, Comey’s book begins to plow increasingly familiar territory for most readers. We have recent memories to guide us through the briars and brambles of Comey’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal server to retain government information—some of it classified—and Comey’s public briefings that served as speed bump, and, finally a brick wall, in the way of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Comey does a fair job of recreating what we think we saw and heard during those fractious moments, but, of course, he does so from his perspective.

It is here that I think Comey is at his most ham-handed, not completely able to account for his motives, struggling to extricate himself from (maybe ‘account for’ would be a better description) decisions he is currently saying on his media tour might have been different. A Gordian Knot for sure, and one that even Alexander the Great would have been unable to loosen, much less untie or cut.

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, begins its windup chapters with a quote from former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.” The by-now populace-numbing debacle of the Comey-Trump battle is so well known that Comey’s book sheds only a slightly brighter light on the events that have been playing out in the national media for a year-and-a-half. Readers expecting any profound or revealing passages leading up to Comey’s rude dismissal (nothing like seeing one’s termination notice on a television during a casual meeting in Los Angeles) will probably be disappointed.

 

But take heart. This is not a book about Trump; it is not a tell-all book filled with soapbox defense and crocodile tears; it is not a book about the sorry state of our leadership. It is a book about a man who, at least in his estimation, and reasonably articulated, believes strongly in the enduring strength of the foundation of the American justice system. It is more about a public servant who acknowledges his flaws, his failings, his missteps and miscalculations at a critical juncture in our history. It is also about a man who, regardless of public perceptions formed in the wake of his book’s publication, seems at peace with his decisions and actions during a lifetime of service to the country. 

Consider long and hard your confirmation bias before you start reading; if you can check it at the door, the book will reward you with a story pretty well told.  JM