Jim Comey
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jim Comey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I mean, during our dinner at the White House alone, I tried to explain to Donald Trump during Trump 1.0 why it was in his interest to have an institution that he could give the hardest problems to and say, well, they're not on my squad. They're figuring it out according to the law and the facts. It's without fear or favor. And when you lose that, you lose something important. It's a paradox.
The closer you try and hold that institution, the more problems you create. And I shouldn't use the word paradox. You didn't know what I was talking about. But something is really important and in danger when you conduct the business the way they're doing it now.
I'm not sure there's much I can say if you're going to be trapped in a bubble like that. And there really are bubbles. I mean, when someone yells, fuck you at me on the street, I have to pause and say, is that a Clintonian fuck you or a Trumpian fuck you? And I look for context clues and location and inflection. And it's because people are trapped in their own bubbles.
Why were both sides angry at us? at different times is because we were doing investigations in difficult circumstances without regard to persons, without fear of favor. But if people are going to say, you know, they invaded Trump's home and leave aside the fact that they had a court-ordered search warrant and all that sort of thing, there's not much you can say to them.
And I just wish there were a way to make the bubbles go away.
No, I think we've touched on the right things. There is danger in having the FBI be an attachment to the White House and part of the president's personal team. And it's the reason I was so freaked when Donald Trump asked for loyalty. It's the reason, for example, Louis Freeh surrendered his White House pass when the FBI was participating in investigations that touched the Clinton administration.
You cannot be on the team and do the work credibly. But I think that's the kind of concern you and I have talked about.
No, both in general and in particular with Maria Bartiromo. I'd be on the bulwark, obviously. Look, these guys, in an odd way, I kind of feel sorry for them because they spent years barking nonsense about the FBI and its work to their followers. And then the dogs not only caught the car, they have to drive the car.
And nothing in their lives have prepared them for that, but they're also now driving in a reality-based universe where facts matter and statements have to be under oath and there's accountability in the courts. And so the nonsense has to go away, but their followers who grew up on this They don't see it the same way. And so I got to imagine they're under tremendous pressure.
And look, you can take joy in that. I actually think it'd be better if they didn't have that kind of distraction and they were a different kind of person and could run the FBI without worrying about the followers they had lied to.
Yeah, that's right. And they spent years saying the FBI was a corrupt, deep state cabal of leftists. And I guess they changed that on day one because on day one, it became the greatest investigative agency in the world.
which I believe is the actual truth and that they saw it on day one, I guess is a wonderful thing, but it's going to take their followers a while to catch up, which puts them in a spot.
Yeah. On the face of it, it's beyond fiction. And if I put it in my next book, my editor would strike it out saying, got to write something closer to reality. Right. At the heart of every public corruption investigation is proving the challenge of proving corrupt intent beyond a reasonable doubt that when people took an action and
because the defense that's offered in almost every public corruption case is that I had no intention. of influencing, or it never occurred to me that this might be wrong. Again, the challenge with Donald Trump, though, is that he robs banks without a mask, right? He does it in the middle of the day so he can say, I'm not a bank robber.
I'm sure I have a gun, but who would do this in the middle of the day with no mask? And so it, in an odd way, presents this is not going to be investigated given the nature of the leadership of the Department of Justice, but if they tried to investigate it, that's actually an impediment, this bizarre brazenness But it's not going to be looked at anyway.
The one involving Congressman, I think, Jefferson from Louisiana, where the FBI search found stacks of cash in his freezer that he had taken, as I recall it, expressly to influence what he did with legislation, and then he put it in the freezer. That was one of the worst. I mean, obviously, the Menendez case with the gold bars and the money in his pockets, those are examples that leap to mind.
But unfortunately, there's plenty of others.
We just can't let it... overwhelm us. There's a real danger that we'll just become numb, that we can't even see norms and rules in the rearview mirror. We're so far past it. And we just can't, we can't let it happen.
And, you know, we become numb to the fact that I'm obviously spent my career as a lawyer, seeing these law firms knuckle under and basically mortgage part of the business to Donald Trump that it's happened so much that there's a risk we will become numb to it, which is why we have to keep calling it out. It's why you have to do what you do.
I'm sure you don't enjoy having to talk about it every day, but we cannot let it become normal.
Showing 41–60 of 98 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →