Former FBI head James Comey on being fired by Trump, writing fiction and US elections

Former FBI director turned crime writer James Comey tells Saturday Morning about making tough moral decisions in office, being fired by Donald Trump, and how the wealthy succumb to corruption.

An American lawyer, worked as a district attorney, investigating and prosecuting organised crime and terrorism cases, and became the seventh director of the FBI in 2013. He remained in that role until his very public termination in 2017, fired by then president Donald Trump.

What does an ex-FBI boss do after that? Become a crime novelist of course. Central Park West was his first novel in the Nora Carleton series. His follow-up thriller Westport takes readers into the world of high finance and corporate espionage, and has just been released.

Comey told Saturday Morning host Colin Peacock his 2017 firing came as a shock.

"I knew Donald Trump didn't like me, but I thought that was good because that would allow me to stay away from him and protect the FBI.

"I was running an investigation into whether people around him had coordinated with the Russians in their interference on his behalf in the 2016 election. So I was stunned and surprised to be fired."

The year earlier, Comey had played a pivotal role in a loaded political decision that many believe was a crucial mark in the 2016 US presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Just weeks out from election day, Comey chose to release the news that more information had surfaced related to an earlier investigation into Clinton's emails, rather than withhold that news until after the election for fear it could swing the voting.

He believed that decision should not have been left solely to the director of the FBI, but with attempts to engage his boss, the attorney general, on the matter rebuffed, he says he felt he was forced into that position.

"I wish I hadn't been alone, but I had no choice ... there were two doors in front of us and they both led to hell, and we took the least bad door. And I knew at the moment that this is awful, but I'm proud of the way we made that decision, I just wish we hadn't been in that spot."

'The future of the FBI at stake'

Before taking that decision, Comey says "one of my best people" asked him whether he should consider that releasing the new development at that time might help elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.

"I thanked her for that question and said ... the answer has to be no. Because if the head of the FBI starts making decisions based on who he thinks should be president of the United States, then the FBI is lost forever, because the FBI then is a political organisation, it's not making decisions based on law and logic and its own values, it's making political judgements.

"I think the FBI director has to make decisions within the confines of his - or someday I hope her - role, and can't consider those things. Because nobody wants an America in which the FBI director's making judgements based on his own political preferences.

"I wasn't trying to help Donald Trump, I wasn't trying to hurt Hillary Clinton, I was trying to make a choice between two terrible options and figure out which of the options was the most consistent with my obligations to this institution - which are most consistent with the values that are supposed to animate the Department of Justice.

"And I actually still think that we made the decision most consistent with those values."

Abu Ghraib prison and 'enhanced interrogation'

In 2005 during the George W Bush administration, Comey served as deputy attorney general, and played a part in providing legal advice sought by the Department of Justice relating to controversial practices that some US authorities were then calling 'enhanced interrogation': "and [that] I thought of as torture," he says.

"My moral smoke detector was going off, because I thought what they were doing was awful, and the president and the country would deeply come to regret it, and so it was a very difficult time.

"I did my best to oppose what they were doing. I often wonder if I did enough, frankly."

Legal thrillers

Comey says taking up writing after the sudden stop in his high-profile career in public office has been a welcome new adventure.

"It's a really fun way to make a living, and it's a job that allows me to go back on my memory lane, but also take people into some of the places I've been, in a current way.

"So I have found it much more challenging and more fun than I expected."

"A lot of [character Nora Carleton]'s journey is mine ... I lived in Westport Connecticut, which is a really rich fancy suburb of New York City. I lived there for five years.

"[But] Nora is really inspired by my kids, especially my oldest who's a federal prosecutor right now ... I'm closing my eyes and picturing my kids when I write the character of Nora, and I've found that easier and making it a bit of a labour of love."

Comey wanted to use his experiences to provide a different take to patterns he often saw in the legal thriller genre.

"They tend to generate excitement by having characters go rogue, having a prosecutor engaged in some inappropriate conduct to try and achieve a greater good. Or they have the FBI director jumping out of helicopters and that sort to thing. And so I often wince and think 'that's not really the way it is'.

"What I've tried to do is show people the way it really is, and it's really pretty darn exciting, even when people don't go rogue. So I really want it to be accurate, I want to show investigations, show the people in the way I knew them and I think that generates plenty of excitement ... the reason I loved the work so much is it's pretty exciting in its own right."

After working as a prosecutor carrying out investigations, and before the FBI, Comey worked for two hedge funds: "It gave me the grist to create a world that's true to the high-end money management world, but it's not a history of the place that I worked."

While in those roles, his colleagues were honest, his earlier work as an investigating prosecutor meant he had already encountered "a lot" of immoral practices and crime among the wealthy.

"I've seen a lot of dishonest people among the very rich, because having a lot of money sometimes allows people to convince themselves that the rules don't apply to them, or that they're involved in some greater good - they're building an enterprise and they're employing thousands of people so 'I should be able to ... and then fill in the blank there'. I've tried to capture some of that.

"The rich have a choice to make, and they have to decide: am I going to be someone who acknowledges the tremendous luck involved in my being rich? Or am I going to be someone who suppresses that cognitive dissonance by convincing myself that I deserve it all and that I'm above the ordinary and so the normal rules don't apply to me?

"It tends to be split in the road, a lot of people follow the path of having a sense of obligation borne of guilt and others take the darker path."

Does Comey see his future novels dipping into the halls of Washington and the White House?

"I've stayed away from it because so much of Washington is so icky and so painful to write about now," he says.

"But I would like to go there in books, in fiction, at some point. To take readers inside the White House, take them inside the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, to see some of these institutions through those kinds problems.

"It won't be a memoir, but I do think that I could write things that I would enjoy writing and that people would like to read. I just needed some time before doing that."

Comey's third Nora Carleton novel is underway, and he says it will be set in Manhattan, exploring domestic terrorism in the US and white identity. It is expected to be released in May.

A second presidential term for Trump?

Comey doesn't think Trump will be elected again, this year, and hopes he won't.

"There's a lot of concern for good reason.... You can't trust promises that Donald Trump makes. I mean he promises that he'll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it - you can't trust that. But the thing about Donald Trump is that when he threatens, he tends to work very hard to follow through, because he sees an unfulfilled threat as a sign of weakness.

"So when he promises to be the retribution president and to seek revenge through the tools of the criminal justice system on his enemies, you ought to take that seriously."

Those on the playing field could align very differently this time, he warns.

"He didn't have the all star team around him the first time. He will be at the bottom of the American barrel this time. And unfortunately - my beloved country - there's a huge number of people at the bottom of the barrel who will participate.

"It will test the American system in ways that his first term did not.

"If he is elected again, we'll survive it, but there'll be even more damage done to this republic than was done during the first four years."

Listen to the full Saturday Morning interview with James Comey here: