A Higher Loyalty

I have to compensate for two types of bias in my review of A Higher Loyalty.  The first is political, and the fallout of the 2016 Presidential election.  The second is more personal - how does the book compare to my 22-year-old memories of my Trial Advocacy professor?  I've never read, let alone tried to review, a book by someone I knew, albeit slightly.  Because of that, I'm going to break my review down into parts.


Comey's writing style is engaging and highly descriptive, showing an affinity for the language which meshes with my memories of his classes.  As a professor, he emphasized preparation (which indirectly led to my Jack McCoy moment) and using your questions to make the witness comfortable enough to use his vernacular.  He makes those priorities obvious in the chapters on his early career as a prosecutor.  I found them engrossing, particularly the mob trials (which he also used as classroom examples) and the prosecution of Martha Stewart, but readers who aren't lawyers and don't read legal thrillers might not agree.

He also uses a bit of self-deprecating humor to counter an earnestness that verges on self-righteousness.  That's important as he segues into his years as Assistant Attorney General and FBI Director.  Comments about being the "FBI giraffe" and the tight quarters in the Situation Room humanize a man who clearly believes in the American system and the rule of law.  Without that, these chapters might come across as a bit too self serving.  I assume that anyone who writes a memoir has a healthy ego, but Comey's writing style and flashes of humor prevent these chapters from coming across as self-aggrandizing.

Now, about the emails...  I've spent the last 19 months thinking that the FBI mishandled the "October Surprise."  Not just because of my political views, but because I've spent most of my career doing document review.  When I heard, less than 2 weeks before the election, that there were thousands of new emails to be reviewed, my first thought was "de-duping."  Document review programs have gotten much better at de-duping in the 15 years since I moved from hard copy to electronic review - good enough that de-duping (along with predictive coding) has affected my job security.  Comey writes he was told that there was no way to review all of the newly found emails before the election.  My belief (which I think is supported by the fact that the *FBI* did review them all in under a week) is that he received bad information.  Most of the emails were duplicates, and the rest were fully reviewed within a few days.  I've found that partners and associates who either haven't done document review in years or who've always had project attorneys to handle the grunt work don't have a good grasp of the mechanics of electronic review.  My experience has been with associates who don't understand the limitations of the review systems, but I can easily see how the top few levels of the FBI legal team, who probably hadn't done document review since they slogged through a warehouse full of bankers' boxes in the late 20th Century, wouldn't know how good review programs are at de-duping data sets and how an experienced reviewer can separate the relevant an non-relevant documents with a few good keyword searches.  Keeping that in mind, I can understand Comey's reasoning, but I still think he made the wrong decision.

This leads us to Donald Trump.  Press reviews focused on Comey's description of Trump's hair and spray tan, but that's not particularly important.  I was more struck by Comey's comparison of Donald Trump to the mobsters who filled the headlines in the 1980s (and my Friday night viewing while in law school) - so much so that I flashed back to Trial Advocacy and Comey's cadences as he switched between the his prosecution voice and that of his mobster witness.   Except that he's less disciplined, firing (executing) people with little thought about the repercussions.  That mix of ruthlessness and thought-free "decision" making combined with avarice and more than a dash of incompetence scares me.  I think it scares James Comey as well, and reading A Higher Loyalty I think he feels some responsibility.  I just don't know how much.