James Comey

James Brien Comey Jr. (born December 14, 1960) is an American lawyer who was the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 2013 until his termination in May 2017.

The family moved to Allendale, New Jersey, in the early 1970s.

His father worked in corporate real estate and his mother was a computer consultant and homemaker.

Comey is of Irish heritage.

He attended Northern Highlands Regional High School in Allendale.

In 1977 he and his brother were victims of a home invasion by a criminal called "The Ramsey Rapist".

Comey graduated with honors from the College of William and Mary in 1982, majoring in chemistry and religion.

In his senior thesis Comey analyzed the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the televangelist Jerry Falwell, emphasizing their common belief in public action.

He received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of Chicago Law School in 1985.

He is relatively tall at 6 feet and 8 inches.

After law school, Comey was a law clerk for then-United States district judge John M. Walker Jr. in Manhattan.

Then, he was an associate for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in their New York office.

He joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where he worked from 1987 to 1993.

While there, he was Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division and helped prosecute the Gambino crime family.

From 1996 to 2001, Comey was Managing Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the Richmond Division of the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

In 1996, Comey acted as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee.

He also was the lead prosecutor in the case concerning the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.

While in Richmond, Comey was an adjunct professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law.

During the administration of President George W. Bush, Comey was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from January 2002 to December 2003 and later the United States deputy attorney general from December 2003 to August 2005.

In August 2005, Comey left the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to become a senior vice president of Lockheed Martin as general counsel.

In 2010, he became general counsel at Bridgewater Associates.

In early 2013, he left Bridgewater to become a senior research scholar and Hertog fellow on national security law at Columbia Law School.

He served on the board of directors of HSBC Holdings until July 2013.

In September 2013, President Barack Obama appointed Comey to the position of Director of the FBI.

In that capacity, he was responsible for overseeing the FBI's investigation of the Hillary Clinton email controversy.

Comey was a registered Republican for most of his adult life; however, in 2016, he described himself as unaffiliated.

His role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was highly controversial.

Some analysts and some Clinton supporters claim his decisions shortly before the 2016 election might have cost her the presidency, particularly his decision to reopen the investigation into her emails less than two weeks before the election.

President Donald Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017.

Statements from Trump and the White House suggested that Comey had been fired to ease the "pressure" Trump was under due to the Russia investigation.

Later that month, Comey arranged for a friend to leak to the press a memo he had written after a February 14, 2017, private meeting with the president.

It said Trump had asked him to end the FBI's investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor.

The dismissal, various memos detailing meetings with Trump, and Comey's subsequent Congressional testimony in June that same year were interpreted by some commentators as evidence of obstruction of justice by the president and became part of the Mueller investigation.

Inspector General Horowitz found that Comey violated FBI policy regarding the memos; however, it was added that there's "no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media".

The Department of Justice declined to prosecute Comey.

On June 14, 2018, DOJ inspector general Michael E. Horowitz released his report on the FBI's handling of the Clinton email investigation, which criticized Comey's actions during the 2016 election.

In August 2019, the Office of the Inspector General found Comey's retention, handling and dissemination of the memos violated DOJ policies, FBI policies, and his FBI employment agreement.

In December 2019, Horowitz released a report finding no political bias against Trump by Comey or other FBI officials.

Comey was born in Yonkers, New York, to parents Joan Marie Comey (née Herald) and J. Brien Comey.

His grandfather, William J. Comey, was an officer and later commissioner of the Yonkers Police Department.