Former FBI Director James Comey will begin a speaking tour designed to hype up the “ethical leadership” he supposedly exhibited during the early part of the Trump administration.
Comey is joining the ranks of people like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the Washington Speaker’s Bureau (WSB) lecture tour. The lectures are expected to focus on the “moral compass” that guided his decision making during and after the 2016 presidential election.
“Throughout his decades-long career in public service, James Comey has been committed to doing the right thing – at the expense of partisan politics, popular opinion, and even personal friendships,” according to the former FBI director’s bio on the WSB website. The group is known for hooking Washington, D.C. sophisticates into the lecture pipeline.
Comey raised the hackles of both conservatives and liberals during his time with the agency. Many Democrats claimed his decision to re-open an investigation into then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails one month before the election cost her the presidency.
He eventually closed the probe after determining the emails did not contain material that could be used to bring charges against Clinton. Many political analysts perceived Comey’s move to re-open and immediately close the probe as a blunder on his part.
Conservatives, meanwhile, consistently blasted Comey’s refusal to publicly acknowledge that the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s alleged participation in the election was not specifically targeting President Donald Trump.
The president fired Comey in May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested that the FBI’s reputation and credibility have suffered “substantial damage” under the beleaguered director’s tutelage.
Comey wrote at least nine memos of his conversations and interactions with Trump. Some of the documents, which the former director turned over only after leaving the FBI, reportedly contained classified material. He also provided at least one of those memos to a friend with instructions to leak information from the documents to The New York Times.
That document memorialized Comey’s conversation with Trump in the Oval Office Feb. 14, the day after then-senior adviser Michael Flynn was fired from his position. Comey claimed in the memo that the president requested investigators back off Flynn, who was fired for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador.
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