I would like to believe in the redeeming power of guilt—the notion that a guilty conscience can successfully haunt the perpetrator and prompt reform, or if not, serve as punishment. As the son of a Hungarian-American Jewish father and Italian-American Catholic mother, I certainly am familiar with the pangs of the run-of-the-mill guilt that afflict us ordinary folks for mistakes large and small, for the things you should have done, or just generally for not being a better person. But because I have not really had enough exposure to the truly privileged, the most formidable of all, I have always wondered whether guilt dissipates the higher up you reside on the pyramid of power, the greater your transgressions. War crimes, for example, of all sizes. Like blasting boats out of the water without due process. Or cutting SNAP benefits and making it harder to for kids to receive life-saving vaccines. It would be comforting to know that guilt can bring a form of justice to those who manage to evade the International Court at the Hague.
Shakespeare, to whom I often defer when I plumb the human soul, has often advocated for the proposition that there is an obvious toll that guilt takes on those who rule badly and grievously sin. In “Henry VI, Part 3”—relevant to Donald Trump—he tells us, “Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.” In “Hamlet,” Claudius acknowledges the paralysis that has set in as a consequence of his surrender to the lust for power, that fatal failing that led him to murder his brother: “Though inclination be as sharp as will, My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect.” And Hamlet, famously, imagines that by playing/preying upon Claudius’ guilt, “he’ll catch the conscience of the King.”
Last week’s column ended with the May 9, 2017, firing of James Comey. I am guessing Donald Trump could not remember precisely what it was that he said during those private meetings with James Comey, when he asked for his loyalty, or to let Michael Flynn off, or about that time he spent in Russia, or what he had said about all those women who had accused him of abuse. But based on Comey’s unwillingness to yield to his entreaties, I am sure Donald Trump realized it was time to banish him, to remove Comey from office, or maybe worse, to vanquish him. Because no matter what he had actually said, Comey had read the files, even the dossier—who knows, maybe he had met with Christopher Steele. No matter what, Comey knew Trump’s guilt.
So, not surprisingly, Donald Trump could not help himself, transforming suspicion, defense to offense. He could not help but go after Comey. And he just could not hide his distrust, even days before he acted in earnest:
On May 3, 2017, James Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He had no way of knowing that his answers to questions from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R – Iowa) would assume ever greater importance over the years and would reemerge as the linchpin in Donald Trump’s attempt to send him to jail eight years later:
FBI Director James Comey said during testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday that he hasn’t ever leaked information to the media about investigations into Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. ‘Never,’ Comey said when committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley asked him if he’d ‘ever been an anonymous source in news reports in matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation.’
Grassley then asked if Comey had ever authorized anyone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source on these topics, and he said ‘no.’ When asked if any classified information ‘relating to President Trump or his associates’ had been declassified and shared with journalists, Comey said, ‘Not to my knowledge.’
Of course, Donald Trump had learned how to fight dirty from one of the best, his father’s fixer, Roy Cohn, and he had already figured out how to provide some cover for what he was about to do. He had enlisted his weak attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and Sessions’ ambitious deputy, Rod Rosenstein, to make the case for getting rid of Comey:
Sessions and Rosenstein hardly seemed troubled to play their part—though it certainly stretched the imagination for a Republican administration, the very one that had significantly benefited from Comey’s handling of the Clinton email affair, to rely on that as the principal reason to relieve him. But they certainly did not want to tell the truth, to acknowledge that they had realized that Comey would not shut down the continuing investigation into how Russia interfered to help elect Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, almost all the Democrats, and even a few Republicans in Congress, were shocked by the firing and the excuse:
As the Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote:
In a surprise move, President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired FBI Director James Comey, with Justice Department officials citing Comey’s bungled handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe as a main reason for his departure, as Democrats charged it was more of an effort to short circuit a probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, which they say might have ties to the Trump Campaign.
It was only the second time an FBI Director had been fired – the first was when President Bill Clinton ousted William Sessions (no relation to Jeff Sessions, the current Attorney General) ,,, When it comes to questions about Russia, and 2016 election ties to the Trump Campaign, Democrats quickly called for a special prosecutor in the wake of the firing of the FBI Director, something they’ve been pushing for since the November elections. ‘The President’s sudden and brazen firing of the FBI Director raises the ghosts of some of the worst Executive Branch abuses,’ said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi …
There were GOP voices who were not on board with the firing of the FBI Director by President Trump. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) said he found the timing ‘very troubling.’ Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) labeled part of Mr. Trump’s letter to Comey, ‘bizarre.’ The Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) was even more blunt: ‘I am troubled by the timing and reasoning of Director Comey’s termination,’ Burr said. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said the public deserves ‘an explanation for his immediate firing.’
Firing was not enough. Trump decided it was necessary to destroy Comey’s reputation and his reliability as a witness in the court of opinion, if not a court of law. The assault began in the early hours of the next day:
Until I started to go back and excavate this bit of recent history, I had no real idea of how unrelenting the attack on Comey was. And I thank Shakespeare for helping me to realize how deeply hate and resentment had penetrated Donald Trump’s being. Yes, Donald Trump was a hater supreme, from Pelosi to Schiff to Rosie O’Donnell, but Comey had somehow earned a special spot. And, as we will see, I believe that unique revulsion made him sloppy. It took far too many years, but that obsession may have done him in.
It took but a moment for Donald Trump to celebrate. And in a stunning example of the unconscious at work, Donald Trump could not help but celebrate with precisely those folks James Comey and the FBI had been investigating. Comey was out, and the Russians were in:
No sooner had Lavrov and Kislyak left than the abuse continued. Maybe this was just a small example of what Comey suspected might happen when he shared the findings of the intelligence reports with the president: “I long ago learned that people tend to assume that you act and think the way they would in a similar situation. They project their worldview onto you, even if you see the world very differently.” In this particular nightmare scenario, Trump was the Cosa Nostra, and Comey had him on tape. And in Trump’s fevered imagination, he would head Comey off at the pass, preemptively threatening him with what he feverishly imagined Comey had on him:
There is a delicious irony to Donald Trump’s focus on leaking: It quickly became apparent that not only could he not help but brag to Lavrov and Kisylak that he was done with Comey but he shared top-secret classified information from Israel about ISIS with them:
I do not imagine Donald Trump had even imagined how his tweet about the tapes might backfire. It only confirmed James Comey’s need to defend himself. No, there were no tapes, at least in Comey’s possession. But his decision to memorialize all of his critical meetings with the president in the memos he prepared right after they spoke provided him, and the nation it turned out, with the opportunity to consider another version of their interactions.
In “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey reveals the precautions he had taken to make sure he could tell the other side of the story:
Now that I was a private citizen, I could do something. I decided I would prompt a media story by revealing the president’s February 14 direction that I drop the Flynn investigation. That might force the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor, who could then go get the tapes that Trump had tweeted about. And, although I was banned from FBI property, I had a copy of my unclassified memo about his request stored securely at home.
Tuesday morning, after dawn, I contacted my good friend Dan Richman, a former prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School. Dan had been giving me legal advice since my firing. I told him I was going to send him one unclassified memo and I wanted him to share the substance of the memo—but not the memo itself—with a reporter. If I do it myself, I thought, it will create a media frenzy—at my driveway, no less—and I will be hard-pressed to refuse follow-up comments. I would, of course, tell the truth if asked whether I played a part in it. I did. I had to.
To be clear, this was not a ‘leak’ of classified information no matter how many times politicians, political pundits, or the president call it that. A private citizen may legally share unclassified details of a conversation with the president with the press, or include that information in a book. I believe in the power of the press and know Thomas Jefferson was right when he wrote: ‘Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.’
I don’t know whether the media storm that followed my disclosure of the February 14 ‘let it go’ conversation prompted the Department of Justice leadership to appoint a special counsel. The FBI may already have been pushing for the appointment of a special counsel after seeing the Trump tweet about tapes. I just know that the Department of Justice did so shortly thereafter, giving Robert Mueller the authority to investigate any coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign and any related matters.
I also don’t know whether the special counsel will find criminal wrongdoing by the president or others who have not been charged as of this writing. One of the pivotal questions I presume that Bob Mueller’s team is investigating is whether or not in urging me to back the FBI off our investigation of his national security advisor and in firing me, President Trump was attempting to obstruct justice, which is a federal crime. It’s certainly possible.
[Emphasis added.]
So, based on a conversation with Daniel Richman, here is what Michael Schmidt reported for The New York Times:
Schmidt wrote:
Only seven days after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as president, James B. Comey has told associates, the F.B.I. director was summoned to the White House for a one-on-one dinner with the new commander in chief. The conversation that night in January, Mr. Comey now believes, was a harbinger of his downfall this week as head of the F.B.I., according to two people who have heard his account of the dinner.
As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him. Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not ‘reliable’ in the conventional political sense.
The White House says this account is not correct. And Mr. Trump, in an interview on Thursday with NBC, described a far different dinner conversation with Mr. Comey in which the director asked to have the meeting and the question of loyalty never came up. It was not clear whether he was talking about the same meal, but they are believed to have had only one dinner together.
By Mr. Comey’s account, his answer to Mr. Trump’s initial question apparently did not satisfy the president, the associates said. Later in the dinner, Mr. Trump again said to Mr. Comey that he needed his loyalty … Mr. Comey described details of his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump to several people close to him on the condition that they not discuss it publicly while he was F.B.I. director. But now that Mr. Comey has been fired, they felt free to discuss it on the condition of anonymity …
In announcing Mr. Comey’s dismissal on Tuesday, the White House released documents from the attorney general and the deputy attorney general that outlined why Mr. Comey should be fired. Mr. Trump said in the NBC interview, ‘Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey … In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,’ Mr. Trump said.
[Emphasis added.]
By the next week, Michael Schmidt acknowledged the existence of the Comey memos. Clearly, James Comey had accurately anticipated the impact of memorializing these conversations:
Schmidt added the Michael Flynn conversation and memos to his previous account:
Mr. Trump told him he hoped Mr. Comey would shut down an investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Trump has denied making the request. The day after the Flynn conversation, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Comey to help push back on reports in the news media that Mr. Trump’s associates had been in contact with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign.
Mr. Comey described all of his contacts with the president and the White House — including the phone call from Mr. Trump — in detailed memos he wrote at the time and gave to his aides. Congressional investigators have requested copies of the memos, which, according to two people who have read them, provide snapshots of a fraught relationship between a president trying to win over and influence an F.B.I. director and someone who had built his reputation on asserting his independence, sometimes in a dramatic way.
[Emphasis added.]
On June 8, 2017, ABC News reported on the impact of Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee: “During this afternoon’s testimony, Comey said he shared the contents of a memo that he had previously written about a meeting he had had with Trump with a friend.”
ABC continues:
The president’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, issued a statement after Comey’s public testimony, reiterating facts that he felt bolstered Trump’s claims and going after Comey for the revelation about how he shared his memos. ‘Today, Mr. Comey admitted that he leaked to friends his purported memos of these privileged conversations, one of which he testified was classified,’ Kasowitz said this afternoon. ‘We will leave it to the appropriate authorities to determine whether this leak should be investigated along with all those others being investigated,’ he said …
When questioned by Republican Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), Comey made it clear that his decision to release the memos was meant to provoke the appointment of a special counsel:
COLLINS: Okay. You mentioned that from your very first meeting with the president, you decided to write a memo memorializing the conversation. What was it about that very first meeting that made you write a memo when you have not done that with two previous presidents?
COMEY: As I said, a combination of things. A gut feeling is an important overlay, but the circumstances, that I was alone, the subject matter and the nature of the person I was interacting with and my read of that person. Yeah, and really just gut feel, laying on top of all of that, that this is going to be important to protect this organization, that I make records of this.
COLLINS: Finally, did you show copies of your memos to anyone outside of the department of justice?
COMEY: Yes.
COLLINS: And to whom did you show copies?
COMEY: I asked — the president tweeted on Friday after I got fired that I better hope there’s not tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night because it didn’t dawn on me originally, that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might a tape. My judgment was, I need to get that out into the public square. I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons. I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. I asked a close friend to do it.
Whatever you think of James Comey, I think it is fair to say that he was right to trust his instincts. Surely that decision brought us Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. And while the combination of the MAGA misinformation machine and the accumulated cowardice of Sessions, Rosenstein, and Barr may have blunted the revelations of the Mueller Report, its extensive findings live on, hopefully to reemerge when information is valued and history respected once more.
Donald Trump is a master at distraction, and he has done his best to distract from the truth preserved in the memos. His lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, laid out the strategy. While they would contest everything James Comey would say, they would distract from the content itself and declare him a criminal.
And so those memos, and the role Daniel Richman played in getting the story to The New York Times, leads us to a critical chapter in the story of the United States v. James Comey. Adding the very serious crime of leaking to their previous charge of Comey’s incompetence:
And, of course, one tweet is never enough:
And one month later, leaking classified information:
So the FBI initiated an investigation into James Comey’s handling of these documents and Daniel Richman’s efforts to help James Comey. And so it was that the material seized by the FBI in the course of that investigation turns out to have played a critical role years later in the 2025 indictment Lindsey Halligan brought for the Eastern District of Virgina.
Meanwhile, the final report of Inspector General Horowitz details how Comey approached the release of those memos:
Horowitz writes for the Office of the Inspector General (OIG):
Richman confirmed to the OIG that he was one of the sources for the May 11 article, although he said he was not the source of the information in the article about the Trump Tower briefing … Richman told the OIG that he learned Comey had been fired when a reporter for The New York Times called Richman’s cell phone on the evening of May 9, 2017 to ask ‘what the hell is going on?’ Richman said he and the reporter had ‘been friends for some time’ and the reporter was one of several journalists who frequently called Richman to ask questions about ‘various news stories in the federal criminal world.’ Richman said he told the reporter what he remembered about Comey’s dinner with President Trump, including ‘the honest loyalty piece.’ Richman also said that at that time, he had not seen a copy of Memo 2 and the information Richman provided to the reporter did not involve reading from a Memo.
During his interview with the OIG, Richman was asked to review the last page of Memo 2, which described the President’s comments about returning telephone calls from leaders of foreign countries. The copy of Memo 2 shown to Richman by the OIG was redacted so that the names of the countries, which the FBI determined to be classified, as discussed below in Section IVN, were not identified. Richman told the OIG that he had not disclosed any information to anyone from Memo 2 about the President’s statements returning telephone calls from foreign leaders or any specific country names …
When we asked Comey whether he knew who the two sources were for the article, he said that he was ‘highly confident Richman was one of them’ but that ‘I don’t think I know who the other one is.’ Comey further stated that Richman was not speaking to The New York Times at Comey’s direction for the May 11 article …
Comey told the OIG that he did not notify anyone at the FBI that he was going to share these Memos with anyone, and did not seek authorization from the FBI prior to emailing these four Memos to Fitzgerald. Comey told the OIG that he deleted his electronic versions of the email and the PDF attachment that he sent, and did not retain a hard copy of either …
Comey told the OIG that on Tuesday, May 16, 2017, he ‘w[o]ke up at 2 o’clock in the morning, like, struck by a lightning bolt.’ He said he suddenly realized that if, as the President had said in his May 12, 2017 tweet, there were ‘tapes,’ then Comey’s version of his one-on-one conversations with Trump could be corroborated. In particular, Comey told us he thought that the President ‘would be heard on that tape asking [Comey] to let Flynn go’ as Comey had documented in Memo 4. Comey said he also realized that ‘Trump will eventually figure out he shouldn’t have said that. And he may well destroy the tapes,’ so somebody needed to preserve them. Comey said he was lying there, playing this in my mind. And I thought, I can actually do something. That if I put out into the public square that encounter, that will force DOJ, likely to appoint a Special Counsel to go get the tapes. Or even if they won’t do that, it will force them to go get the tapes.
Comey told the OIG he lay awake thinking the tapes could be preserved, ‘[b]ut only if I spur [the appointment of a Special Counsel] by putting this out.’
On the morning of May 16, Comey took digital photographs of both pages of Memo 4 with his personal cell phone. Comey then sent both photographs, via text message, to Richman. Comey told the OIG that he transmitted this copy of Memo 4 to Richman on May 16 because Comey ‘had a specific assignment for him.’ Comey told the OIG he knew Richman had a close relationship with a reporter for The New York Times. According to Comey, he directed Richman ‘to share the content[s] of this memo, but not the memo itself, with [the reporter].’ Comey also said that, although Richman was his attorney at the time, Comey ‘didn’t intend to assert any kind of privilege about the direction’ he gave to Richman. Comey told the OIG he directed Richman to share the contents of Memo 4 with The New York Times because I had a conversation with the President of the United States. It was unclassified, on February the 14th. I’m a private citizen. I can talk about conversations I had with the President of the United States. I happen to have that conversation enshrined in an accurate way in this memo. So to ensure that the newspaper gets the most accurate account of my recollection, I’ll send the memo to Richman. Tell him, use this; don’t give them the memo, but use this to communicate the substance of it.
Comey told us he needed to do this because it was something he was ‘uniquely situated to do, because [he was] now a private citizen.’ He told us that by speaking out, or enabling someone else to speak out, it would ‘change the game’ and create ‘extraordinary pressure on the leadership of the Department of Justice, which [Comey did] not trust, to appoint someone who the Country can trust, to go and get those tapes.’ …
Comey said he took the actions he took because he ‘was doing…something I [had] to do if I love this country … and I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI,’
Comey told the OIG that notifying the FBI and Department of Justice about his plans before disclosing the contents of Memo 4 was not something he could do ‘if I care about the Country.’ Comey said that he did not want to put the leadership of the FBI ‘in an impossible position’ by notifying them ahead of time because if he asked them to approve what he was planning to do, ‘they’d have to tell the leadership of the Department of Justice that the … former Director is contemplating doing this’ and Comey believed it was ‘better that [he] not engage them.’
Accordingly, Comey stated that he did not notify anyone at the FBI that he was going to share the contents of the Memo 4 with Richman or the media, and that he did not seek authorization from FBI to provide Memo 4 to Richman.
We asked Comey why he used Richman rather than providing the information directly to the media. Comey told the OIG that, at that time, there ‘was an army of reporters and cameras at the end of [his] driveway.’ He said he thought about talking directly to them, but decided that would be ‘crazy,’ ‘like feeding seagulls at the beach’ … He told the OIG that, at the time, he thought t ‘the smartest thing for [him was] just to get the information out in a way that [he did not] have to answer questions’ to avoid ‘creat[ing] even more of a storm than [was already] going on.’
It is interesting to note that the OIG reports credit Daniel Richman with cooperating with their investigation:
Priestap told the OIG that Richman was ‘courteous,’ ‘cooperative,’ and ‘willing to give [the FBI] whatever’ he had. Priestap also said that, by this time, the classification review of the Memos ‘had been completed at least … from [his] end’ and that he was concerned that ‘there could be classified information’ contained in what Richman received from Comey. The FBI’s plan was ‘[t]o have agents go retrieve a mirror copy of the hard drive contained in what Richman received from Comey and then return it to Mr. Richman with the classified information removed.’
That FBI copy of Richman’s hard drive plays a significant role years later in the 2025 indictment of James Comey.
In the end, the OIG made these determinations:
We conclude that the Memos were official FBI records, rather than Comey’s personal documents … Accordingly, after his removal as FBI Director, Comey violated applicable policies and his Employment Agreement by failing to either surrender his copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 to the FBI or seek authorization to retain them; by releasing official FBI information and records to third parties without authorization; and by failing to immediately alert the FBI about his disclosures to his personal attorneys once he became aware in June 2017 that Memo 2 contained six words (four of which were names of foreign countries mentioned by the President) that the FBI had determined were classified at the ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ level …
Comey’s drafting of the Memos can only be viewed as the ‘act of creating and recording information by agency personnel in the course of their official duties.’ … As a departing FBI employee, Comey was required to relinquish any official documents in his possession and to seek specific authorization from the FBI in order to personally retain any FBI documents. Comey failed to comply with these requirements.
VI. Conclusion …
Comey said he was compelled to take these actions ‘if I love this country…and I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI.’ However, were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director’s example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions, the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly …
The OIG has provided this report to the FBI and to the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility for action they deem appropriate.
According to NBC News, despite the conclusions of Horowitz and the OIG, the Department of Justice did not think there was enough evidence to prosecute Comey. Comey quickly celebrated:
The president weighed in a few hours later with more insults rather than a commitment to prosecute:
I hope that this column reveals some of what Donald Trump and his enablers have done to distort the very nature of our Department of Justice. Unfortunately, the Office of the Inspector General concentrated its investigative powers for the DOJ not on the apparent efforts of the Russians and members of Trump’s team to influence an American election and our subsequent politics, but on the attempts of James Comey to preserve and document Donald Trump’s efforts to make the director of the FBI a loyal agent in that subversion.
The story continues, as is often the case: Next time, will see exactly how Donald Trump’s mistakes, and the mistakes of his enablers, have come to haunt him.
