contested encounter. after a meeting at the white house with attorney general jeff sessions, comey says the president asks everyone to clear the room so he can speak with comey alone. jim comey looks sort of imploringly over his shoulder at the attorney general saying, don t leave me alone with him, please! something terrible is about to happen. he has a premonition. what happens, according to comey, is that trump asks him to back off the investigation of his national security adviser michael flynn, whom he fired a day earlier for lying about his conversations with the russian ambassador. the request raises questions. was trump asking comey to move past the flynn investigation because he was being loyal to flynn or is it because there s something that flynn knows? comey faces a new challenge two weeks later, when the president tweets that president obama had trump s wires tapped
he broke with the white house in a very, very dramatic fashion. wednesday, march the 10th, i remember exactly where i was, on constitution avenue, and got a call telling me that mr. card and mr. gonzalez were on the way to the hospital to see mr. ashcroft. with bush s chief of sff andy card and white house counsel alberto gonzalez en route, comey feels the pressure. i was concerned that given how ill i knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that. i told my security detail that i need to get to george washington hospital immediately. there is a race to ashcroft s hospital room. and jim comey goes bounding up the steps, two steps at a time, to beat bush s emissaries to ashcroft s hospital room. i literally ran up the stairs with my security detail. and mr. ashcroft was lying down in the bed. the room was darkened. he seemed pretty bad off. i went out in the hallway, spoke
that wasn t jim comey. but when the professor called on him, he usually knew the answer. soon after law school, he and patrice marry and he joins the district attorney s office in the southern district of new york. at 6 8 , comey quickly makes his mark. my first impression was that he was very tall. and he was, i came to know, super smart, very funny, and just a charming individual. comey meets a set of like minded friends who form a close knit group that will last for decades. we sort of grew up together in the offices of assistant u.s. attorneys. there s a lot of people tre who take themselves very seriously. we were not amongst tt group. always looking to get a good laugh and to see the humor in things. we re all of the same ilk, not being motivated for any sort of personal gain or any sort of political gain, but just there to fight the good fight for the good guys. comey s sense of justice and
comey says he immediately writes a memo detailing their discussion. it s a pattern he will follow throughout the winter and spring of 2017. two days after he s inaugurated, president trump calls law enforcement officials to the white house. comey doesn t want to go. an environment in which large numbers of democrats suspect that he had intervened in the election to trump s benefit. the idea that he would then have some display of closeness by being at the white house with trump struck him at wrong. oh, and there s james. jim described walking across the room, committing to himself, there is not going to be a hug. and then trump pulls him into what actually got described as a hug. and he left feeling like there was a deliberate effort to
loyalty over everything else and in fact had asked jim comey for loyalty. in trump s mind, apparently loyalty means standing up and saying that the sky is red because i, the president, have said the sky is red. and comey, like most honorable public servants, wasn ti inwill to do that. comey tells trump he is not the subject of the investigation but says the president still asks him to lift the cloud of the russia probe. he expected a rocky time, a very challenging time, but one in which he would be committed to steering the ship through these roiling waters. in the end, the decision is not comey s to make. comey is out in los angeles. he s talking to some staff there. and he looks up and sees on the television in the back of the room the breaking news alert that he s been fired.