The Tribune

JAMES Comey is in the headlines again. It is likely that he will stay there longer than most news stories out of Washington and New York these days.

Comey, a 6 foot 8 inch tall puritan moralist who was appointed FBI director by Barack Obama and fired by Donald Trump in May 2017, has produced a 300-page memoir entitled “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” in which Comey excoriates Trump’s character and attempts to explain why he felt the need to take steps that helped swing the 2016 election to Trump.

The new book will be released tomorrow, but as usual, copies have found their way into newsrooms across the country as the publisher’s publicists drum up as much pre-publication buzz as possible. Most of the juicy parts have already been revealed, but Comey’s planned book tour will keep his book on people’s minds for a while.

Some observers feel that Comey’s memoir is the largest story in a week full of big stories. The U.S. bombed Syrian military installations in reprisal for Syria’s deployment of poison gas on its own people, for instance, stimulating a few to recall the events in the Balkans in 1914 that led a largely reluctant Europe into World War I. This is because there are many Russian troops in Syria and fears arose that the U.S. attack would provoke face-saving countermeasures that could lead to an American armed conflict with Russia.

Also, the FBI seized records from Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, as part of a widening corruption investigation that may pose a greater threat to Trump’s staggering presidency than the Mueller probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Lingering around the edges of the investigation are salacious reports of Trump’s interactions with prostitutes, porn stars and playmates, prior to and during his current marriage.

And Republican Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin who for the past two and a half years has served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced he would not seek re-election this November. Ryan, who still stubbornly believes in supply side economics, a discredited dogma from the 1980s, may have finally given up on the possibilities of working with Trump and his own fractious band of Republicans in the House.

Meantime, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was testifying on Capitol Hill to two committees about the inordinate influence of unchecked social media on the course of world events. And former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, in a book of her own, warned of the dangers of American fascism that she sees as closer to realization than many believe.

But it’s Comey who has the nation’s attention. And it is Comey who is clearly on Trump’s mind. Trump immediately called Comey an “untruthful slime ball,” and we can expect much more from the Twitter president.

Comey is a person for whom “trying to do the right thing” is paramount. This stance is what led him to announce in the waning days of the 2016 election that the FBI had reopened its investigation into classified material in Hillary Clinton’s emails. Comey writes that if he had not done so, her election would have been “illegitimate.” Though Comey said two days before the election that the renewed investigation had cleared Clinton, many feel his moral certitude cost the Democrats the election. Clinton wrote that she had felt “shivved” by Comey.

It is hardly surprising that someone of Comey’s strict values should collide with a moral agnostic such as Trump, and the two have been sparring publicly for a year. Comey’s book is the first significant memoir from someone who has played a major role in the 15-month-old Trump administration, so it will naturally receive outsized attention.

In the book, Comey writes that Trump “is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values.” Working with Trump and his supporters reminded Comey of his investigations of the Mafia in New York, with “the lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.”

Comey, relying on careful notes from his interaction with Trump, recalls other incidents that damn the president. We haven’t heard the last of this.