When It Mattered Episode 3: James Comey
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When it Mattered Episode 3: James Comey Chitra: Hello and welcome to When It Mattered. I'm your host Chitra Ragavan. I'm also the founder and CEO of Goodstory Consulting, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. On this weekly podcast we invite leaders from around the world to share one personal story that changed the course of their life and work, and how they lead and deal with adversity. Through these stories, we take you behind the scenes to get an inside perspective of some of the most eventful moments of our time. Chitra: On this episode, we will be talking to James B. Comey. He has spent four decades in law as a federal prosecutor, a business lawyer, and working closely with three US Presidents. We served as Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush. In September 2013, President Barack Obama appointed Comey as the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In that role, Comey came under fire for his handling of the bureau's investigation into the Hillary Clinton email controversy in the lead-up to the 2016 US elections. Comey's 10 year term was cut short in May 2017 when President Donald Trump summarily fired him as the FBI Director. Statements from the president and the White House indicated that the firing was intended to ease the pressure over the FBI's investigation of the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. Comey currently teaches ethical leadership at William & Mary College and is the author of the book Higher Loyalty. Jim, welcome to the podcast. James: It's great to be with you, Chitra. Chitra: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into law and law enforcement. James: Well, I was a science focused kid in high school and thought that I would become a doctor. Looking back through the lens of now as an old person, I think an event that happened to me as a senior in high school steered me in a way that even I couldn't see at the time. A serial rapist and robber kicked in my parent's front door one night at their home in Northern New Jersey and ended up in a terrifying evening holding me and my brother captive. We escaped, he caught us again, and at least twice during that night I thought he was going to kill us, and that had an enormous effect on me. It helped give me some perspective on life that was useful, as painful as it was, and I think again, without me even knowing, it steered me in a way towards law enforcement and thinking about what victims experienced. I still thought I was going to be a doctor, and then figured out that wasn't for me late in my college career about three years later. Chitra: What happened? James: Well, I first took a class called Death, and the experience of that night at my parent, lying in my parent's bed thinking I was about to be killed had brought kind of a darkness to me as a young person and an obsession understandably with death. I was a chemistry major walking through the chem building one day and I didn't know it shared space with the religion department, and I saw the word death on a bulletin board and so I stopped, and it turns out it was a course offering and the professor, who became a friend of mine said most places call that death and dying, but he thought that was too depressing, so he called it death. I signed up for death and it changed my life. My subject was interesting, but I got introduced to the ethicist in the religion department, a guy named Hans Tiefel, and gradually through interacting with him and the readings we did, I came to realize, you know what? Given my strengths and weaknesses, I can be more useful to people as a lawyer than as a doctor. So I doubled majored in chemistry and religion, and at the end of my junior year switched and decided to take the LSAT and apply to law school. Chitra: When you got out of law school, you didn't know what type of lawyer you wanted to be till you attended a court case dealing with the mafia. What was the case and why did it have such an impact on you? James: Yeah, all I knew is that I wanted to help people, and I represented poor people in a clinic in law school and loved that work, but I went to clerk for a federal judge in Manhattan, and he would let us sit in the courtroom if cool stuff was going on, and what was going on didn't seem cool on the face of it, it was just a bail hearing, but it was more than just a bail hearing. It was the government trying to use a brand new statute from congress to hold without bail the boss of the Genovese crime family, one of the five New York mafia families, and the guy's name was Anthony Salerno, nicknamed Fat Tony, and I was a 25 or a 26 year old sitting in the empty jury box, watching as two young prosecutors, not much older than I, presented the case that Fat Tony was a danger to the community, and they had tapes from under his table at the Palma Boys Social Club in East Harlem, which was then a mob enclave, and on the tapes Fat Tony was walking about breaking people's legs and whacking people, and I sat there listening to this and looking at Fat Tony, who was out of central casting. James: He was fat, the nickname was accurate, but he had this bald head, unlit stogy in his mouth, walked with a cane and he spoke with this gravely voice that he would use when his lawyer wasn't doing as good a job as he needed him to do, and so he would shout out occasionally, "That's an outrage, your honor." And so I'm watching this and I think it's the coolest thing I've ever seen. The other defendant in the case was a guy named Vincent The Fish Cafaro, who looked like a fish. And so I was so fired up. I went home and called my girlfriend, now my amazing wife, and I said, "I know what I want to do with my life. I want to be a federal prosecutor." And she said, "What's that." I explained and I said, "And I want to do it here in New York." Where Rudy Giuliani was then the US Attorney, and that was a much longer conversation with my wife, who hated New York. That's how it started. Chitra: Fascinating, but before you became a federal prosecutor in the Southern District, you spent a year in Madison, Wisconsin in a big law firm, and most lawyers tend to hate the big law firm experience. But you say that you really liked it a lot. Why was that? James: Yeah, I know it sounds crazy to say I enjoyed my year at a big soul sucking law firm, and the reason I enjoyed it is they sent me on an assignment, that again, didn't seem real cool, to work as a very junior person on an insurance litigation in Madison, Wisconsin, and I spent almost an entire year, my year in private practice there, and what was amazing about it and life altering was I got to meet the local council who the big firm had hired to help us navigate the local courts with a case that's pending, and his name was Dick Cates, and he was a great person, a great lawyer, a great leader, a great father, a great grandfather, a great husband, and I learned more from just watching that person live, he never gave me any speeches. He just showed me what it was to balance work and life, what it was to find joy in people's stories and in the absurdities of life. What it was to be someone who lived life to the fullest but never took yourself seriously, and could laugh at your own mistakes and laugh at other people's pomposity. James: Dick Cates was a brilliant lawyer who could've gone to work in a big city at a big law firm, but didn't want to do that. He wanted to ride his bike to work and move his children to a farm so they didn't get soft. So he had five kids, which coincidentally is what I ended up with, and he raised them on a farm, he biked to work, he had his own law firm, he took anybody as a client, whether they could pay or not, and he lived an incredibly rich life, although he never made the money that rich people at big law firms make, and that, I talk about the term I use is life plagiarism. I decided I'm going to copy Dick Cates' life, and it's been imperfect, but it's been a goal to be like Dick Cates for most of my life. Chitra: So then you moved to the Southern District of New York, some call it the Sovereign District of New York because of its reach and power of the federal prosecutor there, and you worked under Rudy Giuliani who was somewhat of an antithesis of Dick Cates.