does it say anything about your leadership that strzok, who was a very high-level fbi agent, was doing this? did you set in any way a tone where that kind of glib insult of a major political candidate would be no not that big a deal? no. but it says something about my leadership. i tried to model a certain way of acting that did not include that kind of behavior. should i have given them all a speech? but these are grown-ups. they are senior people in the counterintelligence visiodivisi. but i am responsible for their actions and poor judgment. speaking of leadership, after you were fired you said you got a phone call from homeland security secretary john kelly, now the chief of staff at the white house, in which he referred to the president as
i believe good people can make mistakes. i think andy is guilty of lack of candor, a nice dressed up way of saying he lied. and he s facing the consequences. if you re a new agent with one day on the job or a deputy director 26 hours away from retirement and you lie, bye, felicia, that s what happens. is that a that is not. bye, felicia? as i look by j. edgar, can we say something a little more fbi-ish? this is going to be harsher. i have to preface this by saying i have no ax to grind against james comey. i served as his direct representative to the mexican government and law enforcement for a year. i don t know the man well. i served under him. he never, ever sanctioned me. i have no ax to grind. but reading these memos and reading through this book it tells me the book s title should be abdication of duty. there were so many opportunities for him to push back. i read these memos now, he could have said, mr. president, that s
something that i knew would be useful and important. and reasonable people can disagree about it. i still think it was the right thing to do. i asked you about andrew mccabe. there s been a lot in the news about text messages they sent back and fourrth in which they disparaged a lot of people, including president trump. put yourself in donald trump s shoes for one second. you re donald trump and you feel this is unfair, this investigation. you found out that beater strzok, the lead fbi agent, is texting about you and he s the one that helped conduct the hillary clinton interview. and he called you an idiot, wouldn t you think this whole thing was unfair and politicized? i get why he would be concerned about that. that s the reason why bob mueller removed him from that investigation. it s poor judgment and it shouldn t happen. i get the concern about it. your book is about leadership, throughout.
particular case. when he gave it to his friend he was out of the fbi by then. let me break it down. for the department of justice and a fbi agent or a fbi director, here s how we define an employee. those who hold or who have held a position of trust within the agency. james comey s still a fbi employee. not from a first amendment standpoint. that s a completely different argument. but that s exactly the legal argument. you re calling him a leaker which is a term of art which means disclosing information which is classified. or sensitive. which apparently he did not. we understand his motives. we can agree or disagree with his motives. and then we have the contemporary you memoranda. as i look at the comey memo that talks about let flynn go, it doesn t create for me a compelling case for obstruction
it s a memo. driving my government vehicle to work and i have a car accident, i put it on a memo. sending something to somebody i m not expecting to be used as discovery in a case, i put in it an e-mail. that s what s so curious about this that he decided to record on a memo. can they be used in court? absolutely. but for a fbi agent or a director, if you are thinking that something here is serious enough or could possibly be important enough that you re going to have to testify to it, why was it put why do you think? i don t know. i mean, as i m reading through this and seeing him do it, he puts far more detail than you would put in an fd-302. if i m an agent, i want to stick to just the facts and just the evidence down. he put a lot of detail. michael, do you agree? he s reflecting his state of mind about meetings that he found to be so out of the