Former FBI Director James Comey shares his heart and his ethical concerns with sanctuary full of Minnesotans

LOUISVILLE — Former FBI Director James Comey spoke to a large and appreciative crowd during last week’s Westminster Town Hall Forum, held in the sanctuary at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Watch Comey’s talk and a question-and-answer session that followed  here. Comey is introduced at the 46:20 mark. During the Q&A, Comey is interviewed by a former justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Margaret Chutich. Their conversation begins at 1:17:14.

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Comey led the FBI from 2013 until he was fired by President Donald Trump in May 2017. He’d also worked as a federal prosecutor and a deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. His 2018 and 2020 books on ethics and leadership were best-sellers.

Comey told the large crowd he was honored to be with them, “not just because of what this forum represents, but because of what this community and this state represents to my beloved country,” especially following the killings of Renee Good on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24. “I believe you have given the nation hope, focus and purpose.”

Comey’s talk touched on three themes:

• What truth is and why it is the touchstone of American democracy.
• His perspective “on how we’re doing as a democracy in protecting truth, and especially the role of an independent judiciary in doing that.”
• Why it is “so hard and so important” for a government leaders “to think carefully about and find truth.”

Truth exists, and “there are things that are knowable,” Comey reminded the crowd. “The truth has been the touchstone of America since our founding,” he said. “There is a danger today … because we have been exposed to a tsunami of falsehoods” during the Trump administration, beginning with Trump’s assertion that his first inauguration had more attendees than the first inauguration of his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Since then, “we have faced wave after wave” of lies, Comey said, “and I’m speaking to an audience in Minnesota, a place that has been a target of so much lying, especially in recent weeks and months. … We become so numb that we stop measuring our leaders by their tether to the touchstone.”

Then what are we as a country? “Despite what the so-called Christian nationalists will tell you, we don’t come from a common ancestry, a common heritage, a common religion, a common philosophy,” Comey said. “That’s the normal glue that binds humans across the world into nations. No. We are bound together by a set of values, the center of which is truth.”

“Of course, we’ve never lived into those values,” he said. “We held truths while we held human beings in bondage. But the truth has been at the center of this collection of humans. If we find ourselves in a place where we’ve lost the touchstone, where we’ve gotten tired and numb and we’ve given up, we no longer have the thing that makes us Americans.”

Some of Comey’s recent heroes work in media, “which has acquitted itself extremely well by fighting in the face of a storm of attacks” designed to delegitimize media outlets, he said. Additionally, “the American people with their phones, their voices and their whistles have joined the chorus of people saying ‘No, I will find the truth, I will share the truth and I will speak the truth.’”

“I believe that in doing that, they have safeguarded the touchstone,” Comey said, “reminding the rest of America we can lose sight of the fact that we hold truths, which makes us Americans.”

Besides ordinary Americans, the most “steadfast guardians” of the truth have been “the body of people responsible for protecting the rule of law in America, our judiciary,” especially federal judges, he said, as well as “the juries they steward and the grand juries they steward,” who have “stood up in a way a lot of people haven’t noticed.”

“I believe the rule of law has passed the stress test this year,” Comey said. “Our founders, because we believe that holding the truth is at the center of America, created systems to find truth through the collision of viewpoints. That’s the nature of our judicial system. It’s an adversarial system.” That’s also the nature of our federal government, he noted. “It’s a three-branch, self-interested collision that is designed to produce better results.”

“I’m not here to suggest to you that all is OK,” Comey said. “But the system has functioned as designed.” He said his great fear used to be that the administration “would decline to follow orders from the United States Suprreme Court or courts of appeal” or from other federal judges. “That hasn’t happened, to my great surprise and to my little bit of confusion,” Comey said. “I don’t know why they made the decision to follow court orders … but it’s part of the reason that I say the rule of law has passed the stress test.”

He called the nation’s federal judges “a group of people with a fierce courage and a fierce sense of culture,” with that culture “rooted in being independent people of integrity.” While some can be “a little bit remote” and “sometimes a little bit arrogant,” Comey said that their remoteness, their sense of self and that culture “is the genius of our founding, and it is saving us today.”

He ended his prepared remarks by talking about “why it is so difficult for even the well-intentioned who are leading inside our federal government to find the truth and to hear the truth.” It’s because every leader of every organization “sits uphill from the people they lead,” he noted.

“All leaders are feared by the people downhill from them, to varying degrees,” Comey said. “Every leader has the ability to hurt the people below them — to discipline them, to fire them, to embarrass them.” When he became FBI director, “I was surprised just how steep that hill was. That steep pitch went back to the days of the FBI’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover.

This is true throughout the federal government, Comey said, and the challenge for leaders is to make the slope of the hill gradual enough for the leader to hear the truth, “especially about me — for them to tell me when I’m wrong, when I’m confused, when I’m angry  and when I’m about to make a mistake.”

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Comey then shared stories about the best listener he ever worked for — Obama — and the worst, Trump. When Comey would walk into the Oval Office to brief Obama, the president would take his jacket off and sling it on his chair, then pat the couch to indicate Comey should sit there. He’d ask Comey, “What do I need to know about this?” and then listen without interruption. When Comey finished, Obama would ask questions from points made throughout the briefing. “He was tracking, because he understood the hill and the danger in the hill,” Comey said.

When Trump receives a briefing, he’s seated at the Resolute Desk. “There is now a block of wood between you and the president,” Comey said. “He almost never stops talking. To tell him something, I had to interrupt him.”

“Which of these two approaches to the hill is likely to produce the truth? Only one,” he said. “If you lead an institution in America, at any point under any president, and you hope to make wise and sound decisions, you have to find a way to flatten the hill.”

Comey summarized his talk in this way: “Truth is at the center of America. My report card for the rule of law is, it’s standing up, thanks to the activities of our judges. People who care about finding the truth in government need to find a way to flatten the hill so they can make sound decisions.”

Comey then sat down with Chutich, who asked questions submitted by people online and in the sanctuary. One involved Comey’s assessment of where the Federal Bureau of Investigation is today. “Is there a framework,” Chutich asked, “for a functioning FBI in place?”

“The Department of Justice [which includes the FBI] is deeply wounded right now. The career people are in tremendous pain,” Comey said. Some career lawyers and others are staying on the job “because they believe in the mission, which I helped write: ‘to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.’” His daughter Maurene, a veteran federal prosecutor who led cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs, was fired by the Department of Justice in July without explanation, although her father said it’s because “her last name is the same as mine.”

“Here’s the good news: everyone who cares about the mission wants to go back” to their jobs in the Justice Department, Comey said. “They’re not interested in money. They want to go back and serve the American people and the Constitution. We’re going to be OK in the long run, but in the short run there’s going to be a lot of pain.”

When he’s seeking partners to work on projects, Comey said he always looks “for people who aren’t certain of their own rectitude, of their own view of reality, for their own perspective on things. In that doubt there is wisdom.”

“I have met a lot of people like that around this country who are worried about .. where we’re going, not certain they have the answers but are willing to go out and labor in good faith to protect this thing we believe in so much,” he said. “I cling to that and look for those kinds of people to lead me and to work with me.”

Learn more about the Westminster Town Hall Forum here.