YouSaid · the spoken record

James Comey

lines on the record: 78
first: 2024-07-28
most recent: 2024-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Not to parse. I regret deeply being involved. I knew it at the moment that this is a disaster for the FBI and for me personally, less important, but a disaster. And so I regret being there. I've thought about it a thousand times. I still think we made the best choice among two awful options because, as you said, I had announced the end of that investigation at the beginning of July before the presidential election, and then I'd spent all summer defending that with the Attorney General under oath in Congress saying this is done. We found everything, there's no case here, go away. We're done, we're finished, this is over, over and over and over again, I said the same thing, and because it was true. And then eleven days before the election, my team emailed me at 5.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, she had been using an unclassified email system to talk about classified topics. It happened to be a personal email domain, but it would have been the same issue if it had been Gmail.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grip on the cash cow, which was the labor unions, their ability to extort money from every construction job in the city of New York generated tens of millions of dollars for them. The takeover of all those unions by the government and then the installation of honest leadership changed the mafia. And so they're back now to gambling, loan sharking, stealing stuff off a trucks and out of stores, and extorting people, but they still exist. They're more back to their track suit days standing out in front of a bodega.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They still operate, and obviously I confirm this with Maureen as the chief of organized crime. They're less organized than they once were, and nobody wants to be identified as the boss because being identified as the boss got you a life sentence in federal prison, and they've retreated, they've lost. Maybe the most important thing that all of us in law enforcement did in the 80s and 90s was break the mafia's rules.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's your sibling. And so I added elements. I mean, one of my kids has taught me a lot about a journey of sexuality and discovery. So I added elements of that because I've learned a lot from her life. And then having it be my kids made it a labor of love. And then I made sure it was current by having moreene read it and say, do I have all the details right so that I could get it right? And so that's what happened. And so the first book is in Manhattan. It's Mafia-based. The second book is also with Nora, but now in a big hedge fund in the New York suburbs because I worked one of my private sector jobs was at the world's largest hedge fund in the New York suburbs. And so it's a little bit memory lane for me, but it's a way of in the current age showing these places and telling, I think, cool stories that people will find interesting and entertaining in those environments.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't be a mini meat, it has to be a her. And so I changed the protagonist, created Nora Carleton, patterned after Maureen, and then I added elements of my other kids so that if anybody got upset I could just say that's”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“on her birthday. I remember we were together when it happened, and then she indicted Glenn Maxwell. And so she was in the late part of 201, she was prosecuting Maxwell. The trial was going on, and she was doing it in courtroom 318 at the old federal courthouse in Manhattan. And I wasn't allowed to go because she said, if you go, Dad, it'll be a thing. Don't know what that means, but I couldn't go. And so my wife went and gave me reports of how she was doing. And a weird thing, this should have occurred to me long before this moment, but all of a sudden it hit me. The courtroom three hundred eighteen is the same courtroom, the very same courtroom where I prosecuted John and Joe Gambino when she was a little girl, and now she's on her feet prosecuting Glenn Maxwell in that courtroom.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so if I were going to write it, I'd write it myself. Long story short, he kept pushing and I tried it and found it addictive. And so what I tried to do was, and I'm trying to do this just finishing my third book now, I thought, wouldn't it be fun if I could show people the worlds I've been able to see in a way using the freedom that fiction offers, but keep it real because it's pretty darn exciting without making anything up substantial. And so I could take people into those worlds and show it to them. And then what happened to me is I was going to write Central Park West with a man as the protagonist, kind of a mini me, and I was in Manhattan where my daughter was then still is, a federal prosecutor. She was the chief of the Violent Organized Crime Unit at the US Attorney's Office. And she had indicted Jeffrey Epstein, and then he killed herself.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually didn't want to write fiction and the editor, a nonfiction editor who would work with me on my first, so I wrote two nonfiction books about the Justice Department and that sort of thing. And he kept saying, you should write fiction. And I'd say, no, I don't want to do that. And he'd say, yeah, but you write narrative, you write dialogue, you keep a pace in a really good way. You should do that. And then he said, what if we paired you with like a James Patterson? And I said, Look, I don't know James Patterson, but if I were going to write it, I've always loved to write. I thought I might be a journalist at one point. And so...”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Damaged by this, imagine what happens to other victims of crime. And so it helped me in that way. And I think, I hope made me a better more empathetic person.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I became a law enforcement prosecutor, I was a much better, much better with victims for that experience because I can remember people saying to me, thank God you weren't hurt. And I would say to myself, I thought about that guy every night, not most nights, every night for five years, and I still think about him, and because he was never brought to justice, and so I think about the women that he raped. There was a young girl in my school who I didn't know had been sexually assaulted until I went to a police interview session and saw her there. And then I would pass her in the hallway between classes, and she would just look at me, and I can only imagine I could touch just a piece of the pain she must have endured, and so I would think I wasn't hurt, but I was dead.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I was certain I was about to die, and I don't wish this experience on anyone, but it changed how I thought about life. That I've always felt very lucky to be alive. And so that's, to my mind, that's been a really positive impact. I don't know whether it drove me into law enforcement because I know I don't trust myself as a narrator of my own life, but I still thought I wanted to be a doctor after that. But I wonder if there wasn't something working.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A piece for a literary magazine, believe it or not. And I was home with my brother. Thank God my sister wasn't there. And the Ramsey Rapist kicked in our front door looking for my sister, the police thought. My parents had just gone out, and he had cut the phone lines to the homes on either side of ours, so if we escaped there'd be no way to get help. This is before cell phones, obviously. And so it was very, very frightening night where I was certain at least two points that I was about to be killed. And the first time executed on my parents' bed. And so it was a, we escaped out a window. He caught us. We escaped again. And it was a wild night where he ended up fleeing and the police arrived. And so it had a big impact on me. It actually had a huge impact on how I thought about life.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll try to tell it briefly about depressing you too much. But the summer of 1977 in the New York area was called the Summer of Sam. There was a serial killer named the son of Sam killing couples in the New York area. I lived then, we moved just across from the city on the New Jersey side across the Hudson River. And in our area of the New York area, it was the summer of the Ramsey rapist. It was a serial robber and rapist who was invading homes and brutalizing young girls. And it got so bad that the Boy Scouts in my area developed a call chain where they would call, if you were going to babysit, they would call in check on you every 20 minutes or a half hour. I don't know who would babysit. So I was home, I was a senior in high school, and I was home, was actually the very last time I wrote fiction before these books was that night I was finishing.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I went down and I spent an hour with President Obama, and I called her from just outside the White House after I got my cell phone back, and I said, your faith in their poor judgment is misplaced. I said, I think he's going to ask me to do it. And that's how I ended up with the job.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is what you love So go tell him you'll come down to be interviewed and she paused and said But they're not going to pick you anyway so just do your best. And what she meant was she knew that I had worked for Republicans. She knew that I'd given money to John McCain's campaign and to Mitt Romney's campaign, and the truth is I'd done that because I worried that unprincipled people might take over the American Republican Party a crazy worry. I know. They were two people of principle that I admired. And so she thought there's no way Obama's picking somebody who gave money to his political opponents.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said it's too much, it's too much for my family, I've moved them too much. I can't do that, and he said, Look, I've known you a long time, I wouldn't be calling you if it wasn't a serious thing. Will you consider it? Then I said no, but I'll sleep on it and I'll call you back in the morning. And I'm being too personal here, but I woke up in the morning, and I went down and found Patrice in the kitchen, and I went around behind her, and she was on the laptop. I don't know whether you have a website like this. In the UK, we have something called Zillow, where you can look at homes online. And she was shopping for homes in the DC area. And I'm not a great investigator, but I knew something was up. And I said, what are you doing? And she said, I'm going to quote her directly. I've known you since you were 19. This is who you are.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The George W. Bush administration where I opposed their approach to domestic surveillance and torture, and I left in the summer of 2005 convinced I would never go back to government because these people hate me. And I had enjoyed my time in government, so I went into the private sector in two different jobs. And that was it. And then one day, living in Connecticut, the Attorney General of the United States, it was then a guy named Eric Holder, called me at home and said, hey, Bob Mueller's leaving, will you come down and speak to the president about being FBI director? And I said”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're from New York, you've done terrorism, the Democrats and the Republicans are fighting about who it should be, and you're acceptable to both sides. Will you do it? And I said, yes, I'll do it, but my wife's not home. I'll call you back if there's a problem. And then I waited in the driveway for her. She got out of the car, looked at me, and said, what's wrong? And I said, nothing's wrong. She said, what's wrong? You're in the driveway where the children you're supposed to be watching. And I said that call from the White House and ask me if I would go back to New York. It's very hard to recapture how certainly I felt in October of 2001, but she felt the same way. And so she started crying and saying, oh my God, I'm going back to New York. And so we went, and I was the boss there. And then I was asked to come back to Washington to Washington and be the number two at the Department of Justice. And I got in some major battles inside.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All she was from Iowa and Virginia, and so I agreed to move to a place where I didn't know a soul, Richmond, Virginia, and eventually became a federal prosecutor there, and that's what I was going to do with my life. We had five kids in a nice home in the suburbs. It was just a wonderful life. And then 9-11 happened. And I was, I had done some terrorism cases in the interim, and I was home one day watching my two little girls, and the phone rang. It was a workday, and a guy said he was calling from the White House. This was October of two thousand one. And he said the president would like to know if you will go back to New York and be the United States attorney and the chief federal prosecutor. And I thought it was one of my friends, and I said, there's a truth. I said, yeah, why don't you kiss my ass? And he wouldn't let me finish the word ass. And he said, this isn't a joke.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very narrow faced guy, and they had a mob cooperator testifying against him, and I'm in the jury box a flame. And so I go home and I call my girlfriend, now my wife, who was living in DC, and I said, I know what I want to do with my life. And she said, what? And I said, I want to be a federal prosecutor. I've always hated bullies. I was bullied as a kid. I wasn't a giraffe as a kid. And I said, if I can be part of ridding communities of these people, that's how I want to live my life. She said, that's wonderful. And I said, I want to do it here in New York. We're a guy named Rudy Giuliani was the United States attorney. He seemed different to me then. I don't know. He probably thinks, I seem different then. But long story short, Patrice agreed that that was a job that fit me. And so we went there and I got to do mafia cases for six years. And then she didn't like New York at all.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, an accident really like a lot of my career. I was a federal prosecutor in New York, a job I didn't know I wanted or know much about until I worked for a federal judge in New York after law school. And he would let us sit in the empty jury box and watch court cases if they were interesting, and he led us watch one day some federal prosecutors try and hold the boss of one of the mafia families in New York, the Genevieve's crime family, and they were playing tapes that the FBI had gotten with a court order at Bug under this guy's table at his social club. His name was Fatoni Salerno, and I was 25, and I was sitting there watching this, and it was like a movie. He was at a central casting. He was fat. I mean, that's how he got the nickname, but he called out in court with this gravelly voice, yelling, it's an outrage. And his co-defendant was Vincent the Fish Cafaro, who looked like a fish.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And someone in California gave me a bottle of pinot, and so I opened it and drank it with a paper coffee cup, because I was no longer an FBI employee, not knowing that President Trump was furious that he had seen images of me getting on the airplane in Los Angeles, and so he called the acting director and said, I want an investigation as to why he was allowed to fly home. And Andy McCabe said, I can investigate it, sir, but I know the answer. I said we could blame home. And so I came home numb, honestly, after that.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought that's really good because that'll mean he'll stay away from me and I'll be able to have a certain distance from him which you have to have from the president when you're the FBI director. And I'm also running an investigation to understand where any parts of his orbit coordinating with the Russians in their massive effort to influence the election. And so I felt a little bit like I've been pushed off a bullet train without preparation and was a little numb, honestly. And that night, I didn't know this, but behind the scenes they had a big legal discussion about how I would get home because they needed to know could he fly on an FBI plane on the way back and so the deputy director became acting director that evening said yes were responsible for his safety and so we'll bring him back and I'm a rule follower? I broke a rule that no longer applied to me. You can't drink alcohol in an FBI air blame”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just finish by thanking you, and then I shook you to their hands, and then I start walking down the hall to an office, and my wife calls on my cell phone and says, Have you been fired? And I said, I don't know. And she said, it's all over the news. And I said, I know, I don't know. And so I went and called and found out that there was a guy from the White House, literally on Pennsylvania Avenue in DC trying to deliver a letter to me and knocking on a door that the FBI doesn't use, and so the police were like go away crazy person closer to the truth than we might acknowledge at the time, but they finally get the letter and they read it to me and it says that I'm fired. I was stunned. And I know that sounds strange at hindsight, but I didn't expect to be fired for two reasons. First, I knew Donald Trump didn't like me.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, sorry. First it said Comy resigns and I you don't know the FBI but it's quite a bit of pranksterism in the FBI and so I thought it was a practical joke and so I turned to the leader of LA and said that took a lot of work and then I figured I don't want to get run over by it so I kept going and then as I talked for another minute it then changed to Comey fired which I knew they wouldn't do that as a joke and so now the employees were all turning around looking at the screens because they could see how distracted I was and I said look I don't know whether that's true or not I'm gonna go find out right now”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and I stood at one end and spoke to them, and it was a room with three large screen TVs on the back wall, and they had it on to the news stations, but without sound. And so I started speaking about how, which I believed that everyone is part of the FBI's mission, it's not owned by anyone else, no matter what you do here, you're part of this. I'm so glad that you are. And then I see on the screens it says Comey fired.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can hear me? Yeah, it's on the May 9th of 17. I woke up in my bed outside of DC that morning and was going to a diversity recruiting event in Los Angeles that night. So this was the nature of the FBI director's life. So they flew me from Washington to Jacksonville, Florida for a meeting and then to Los Angeles, and I still got there early enough before the event that I thought I should do what I always liked it when a boss does, go around and just shake everybody's hands and thank them for their work. And so I went through the whole LA field office and had a great leader in LA who I had chosen, a woman named Deirdre Fike. People who clean and the radio room. So she had them gather in a room about the size of the flat part of this. And it was a training.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump, his new Crime Thriller and The Politics of Justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT