James Comey’s long, strange trip into the jaws of Donald Trump’s campaign of retribution

By Marshall Cohen, Jeremy Herb, CNN

(CNN) — Former FBI Director James Comey wasn’t always atop President Donald Trump’s enemies list.

“You’ve had one heck of a year,” Trump, then the president-elect, said to Comey in January 2017, the first time they met face-to-face privately at Trump Tower in New York. Trump told Comey he had a “great reputation” and handled the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server “honorably,” according to Comey’s re-telling of their meeting in his 2018 memoir.

That might have been the high point of their relationship.

Moments later, the FBI director told Trump for the first time about the infamous “Steele dossier,” which alleged that Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election. It was a conversation that would ultimately send Comey spiraling down the path to becoming one of Trump’s chief villains.

Now, Comey is caught in the middle of Trump’s second-term retribution campaign, after he was charged last month with a two-count criminal indictment for allegedly lying to Congress in 2020 about leaks, which CNN has reported appears to be related to the FBI’s Clinton email investigation.

Comey, who has said he is “innocent” of the charges, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in Virginia Wednesday morning. A judge set his trial date for January 5, 2026.

Along the way, unlike his recent FBI predecessors, Comey forged an unprecedented decade-long path to becoming a major political actor, whose every action is weaponized by partisans from both sides for their own gain. He went from a Democratic scapegoat for the party’s 2016 election loss, to a catalyst for the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, to a prominent anti-Trump resistance figure, and now, a criminal defendant.

“Trump is the ultimate pugilist and Comey is his punching bag, because Comey pricks away at Trump’s ego and paranoia,” said Douglas Brinkley, CNN Presidential Historian and a history professor at Rice University. “History will look at them both with jaded eyes, over the fact that these two grown-ups put their country through so many nauseating news cycles of schoolyard one-upmanship.”

Here are the key moments that define the long and winding Trump-Comey grudge:

Clinton bombshells roil 2016

Many Americans had probably never heard of Jim Comey before July 5, 2016.

That’s when – in the heat of a presidential campaign, with the party conventions just weeks away – Comey held an unprecedented 15-minute press conference explaining the results of the FBI’s yearlong investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server.

Comey blasted Clinton for being “extremely careless” with classified emails and said she “should have known” not to use a private server. But evidence of criminal intent was so lacking, he concluded, that “no reasonable prosecutor” would indict the Democratic nominee.

This was unheard of. Investigators rarely announce when an investigation doesn’t lead to charges. And it’s even less common for the FBI chief to publicly criticize a major political figure. Comey said he was providing this “unusual transparency” because “the American people deserve those details, in a case of intense public interest.”

Both sides were instantly enraged. Trump lashed out, saying it proved “the system is rigged.” And Clinton was livid that Comey veered from FBI norms of saying nothing publicly when an investigation ends without any charges.

For the next few months, Trump and Clinton duked it out on the campaign trail. Then, in late October, Comey came roaring back, telling Congress in a letter that the FBI was re-opening the Clinton probe after discovering new emails that belonged to her.

CNN reported at the time that Comey’s move, which was widely described as a potentially game-changing “October surprise,” reinvigorated Trump’s flailing campaign. (Some nonpartisan polling experts like Nate Silver later concluded that it probably cost Clinton the election.)

After the letter, Trump’s past attacks predictably turned into praise. (He said Comey had “a lot of guts.”) But that, too, was short-lived: One week later – a mere 48 hours before Election Day – Comey said the FBI was finished reviewing the new Clinton emails and reaffirmed its view that charges weren’t warranted.

Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign’s top spokesman, recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he still blames Comey for Trump’s 2016 victory but that he believes the charges against him are a “bone-chilling abuse of power.”

“There’s plenty of us that, to this day, feel that, but for the letter that Jim Comey sent to the Hill inappropriately about her email server, 11 days prior to the election, that the election outcome might have gone differently,” Fallon said. “There are plenty of people on our side of the aisle that are not fans of Jim Comey. And yet, none of that … justifies what has happened.”

Trump tells Comey: ‘I need loyalty’

After the 2016 election, Comey was faced with even thornier political problems: The FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s suspicious ties to Russia, and how to handle a related dossier with salacious allegations involving the president-elect.

Two weeks before his swearing in, Trump was briefed at Trump Tower by a wider group of US intelligence leaders about their findings that Russia meddled to help him win the election. Comey asked to speak alone with the president-elect about an even more sensitive matter.

“As I spoke, I felt a strange out-of-body experience, as if I were watching myself speak to the new president about prostitutes in Russia,” Comey recalled in his 2018 book, referring to a salacious and now-discredited allegation in the dossier. “Before I finished, Trump interrupted sharply, with a dismissive tone. He was eager to protest that the allegations weren’t true.”

Just two days after Trump was sworn into office, Comey had a fateful and unsolicited embrace in the White House with the president during a gathering of law enforcement to thank them for their work on the inauguration. The footage would be replayed over and over again whenever Comey was back in the news.

Trump spotted Comey and called out for him. “He’s become more famous than me,” Trump said as Comey walked across the room and awkwardly shook hands with Trump, who leaned in to embrace his FBI director.

Trump’s one-on-one meetings with Comey continued, much to the chagrin of the FBI director, who began documenting them by writing memos of the conversations afterward.

At a January 2017 dinner, Trump told Comey, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” Comey would later recall. The FBI director eventually responded he would provide “honesty” to the president.

The next month, after Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned because of the rapidly escalating Russia scandal, Trump asked to speak alone with Comey following a counterterrorism briefing.

Trump said of the FBI’s probe into Flynn: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go,” according to special counsel Mueller’s 2019 report.

In March, with the Russia allegations swirling in the press over the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Comey had yet another investigative bombshell to reveal publicly for the first time, at a House hearing about Russia’s election meddling.

“The FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,” Comey said on March 20, 2017.

Later that month, the president asked Comey in a phone call to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation by saying Trump was not personally under investigation, Comey would recall. Comey responded that he would “see what we could do,” which he later explained was a way of “kind of getting off the phone.”

Instead, the cloud would only grow larger.

Firing leads to ‘surreal’ Hill hearing

Several weeks later, Comey was on the other side of the country speaking to agents in the Los Angeles field office on May 9, 2017, when the headline blared across a television screen in his eyesight: “COMEY FIRED.”

Back in Washington, a White House aide had delivered to FBI headquarters a letter from Trump, which stated he was firing Comey based on recommendations from top Justice Department officials over his mishandling of the Clinton email probe.

But one day later, Trump revealed his underlying motivation for the firing. He told Russian officials in the Oval Office that he “faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

The next day, Trump went a step further in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, saying he was going to fire Comey regardless of the DOJ recommendation. “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”

Trump also made a veiled threat to Comey on Twitter, writing “James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Comey decided to share the memo of his Trump conversation related to the Flynn investigation with his friend and lawyer Dan Richman, who shared its contents with the New York Times.

“Now that I was a private citizen, I could do something,” Comey wrote. One day after stories about the memo were published, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced Mueller’s appointment.

Comey was invited to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, nearly one month after his firing. The June 8, 2017, hearing was a spectacle on Capitol Hill with anticipation rarely seen for congressional proceedings. The line to get into the hearing stretched around the Hart Senate Office Building. Hordes of reporters and photographers crowded in to witness Comey’s first public comments since his firing. Some bars in Washington, DC, even opened early for Comey watch-parties.

“I walked with the leaders of the committee down the long private hall behind the dais, turned left, and stepped into something surreal. I have seen lots of cameras in my day and heard my share of shutter clicks. Nothing compared to this scene,” Comey wrote in his book about entering the hearing.

During the hearing, Comey recalled his conversations with Trump and the circumstances surrounding his firing. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” he said of Trump’s threat. (There were not tapes.)

“We truly did not know what he was going to say or how this hearing was going to go. In the end, 20 million Americans watched it live,” said Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “As long as I do this, I will probably never live through a crazier day.”

DOJ watchdog excoriates Comey

The Mueller probe was in full swing by June 2018, when the Justice Department inspector general released a bombshell 568-page report that dragged the country’s attention back to the Clinton email investigation.

The report was a devastating blow to Comey, highlighting his missteps and blunders that the watchdog said were “extraordinary and insubordinate.”

The report said Comey improperly shut out his bosses from key decisions during the Clinton probe and then flouted longstanding Justice Department rules on his own, triggering major fallout that damaged the FBI’s apolitical reputation. This included Comey’s press conference about the Clinton case.

To Comey’s credit, the watchdog also confirmed what he said all along and knocked down an often-repeated Trump talking point: The report found Comey’s actions during the Clinton probe weren’t motivated by political bias.

Still, Trump took a victory lap, tweeting at the time that, “Comey will now officially go down as the worst leader, by far, in the history of the FBI.”

Fateful congressional testimony

Comey had been a private citizen for more than three years when he was called back by Republicans to testify before Congress on September 30, 2020.

The Senate Judiciary Committee wanted to speak with Comey as part of its investigation into the FBI’s missteps obtaining a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant for then-Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The hearing was part of an effort by congressional Republicans to discredit the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia — efforts that have continued into the second Trump administration with document releases from FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

“We’re trying to find out as the committee of oversight at the Department of Justice and the FBI how this happened and to make sure it never happens again,” said then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.

Comey appeared at the hearing remotely from his home in Virginia due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a fact that would become relevant in his indictment nearly five years later because the case against Comey was prosecuted by the US attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia.

The former FBI director gave no opening statement and defended the FBI’s Russia investigation in response to Republican criticism.

“In the main, it was done by the book, it was appropriate, and it was essential that it be done,” Comey said.

But it was a line of questioning from Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, that would — years later — become the most consequential part of the hearing, forming the basis of the allegations from last month’s indictment that he lied during the testimony.

Cruz raised Comey’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in early May 2017, one week before he was fired, when he said he had not been an anonymous source nor authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source.

Comey responded to Cruz: “I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by what the testimony you summarized, that I gave in May, of 2017.”

That short exchange — in which Comey reaffirmed testimony from three years prior — forms the basis of the current charges against him. The Justice Department alleged in its indictment that Comey “knew” during the 2020 hearing that he “in fact had authorized” an unnamed contact of his “to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation.”

The indictment does not include any specifics about the leaks, beyond saying he had “authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports.” CNN reported last month that “Person 3” appeared to be Richman, who was at one point during Comey’s tenure a special government employee at the FBI.

Comey’s ‘86 47’ post

After that Congressional hearing, and after Trump’s departure from the White House in 2021, Comey fell out of the national conversation.

He drifted further into the anti-Trump “resistance” by endorsing Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in 2024. And he posted messages supporting FBI rank-and-file after Trump returned to power this year and started purging officials.

It was obvious — from Trump’s campaign promises — that Comey would face intense scrutiny from the second Trump administration. But he created new problems for himself with a social media post in May.

The bizarre post showed seashells at the beach that spelled out “86 47,” potentially referring to “86,” which means to get rid of something, and possibly referencing Trump, who is currently the 47th US president.

Trump and his allies, including right-wing outlets like Fox News, went into overdrive to accuse Comey of making death threats. He was even interviewed, voluntarily, a few days later by US Secret Service agents about the post.

In response, Comey said he randomly discovered the shells, didn’t know what it meant, but said, “I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down.”

The debacle added kerosene to Comey’s long-running feud with Trump, but Comey didn’t face any charges for what Trump claimed was an assassination threat. The criminal charges came four months later, in September, in a case that stretched back to where it all began: Clinton and 2016.

“Trump is going for the jugular now with the charges against Comey,” said Brinkley, the presidential historian. “In a modern context, looking back to the turn of the 20th century, this is something vastly more authoritarian than we’ve ever seen. But you do see it all the time in unstable countries.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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