I told Trump over dinner he didn’t have my loyalty – it sealed my fate

James Comey served as deputy attorney general under Republican president George W Bush before he was appointed director of the FBI by Democratic president Barack Obama in 2013. Comey faced controversy over his handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 presidential race, and in May 2017 he was fired by Donald Trump. Trump later suggested the termination was related to Comey’s investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the election.

In September last year, Comey was charged with making false statements and obstruction. The case was dismissed. Last month, he was indicted again over a photo he posted on Instagram in which seashells were arranged to read: “86 47″. Since ” to 86″ can be slang for removing someone and “47” can be seen to refer to Trump – the 47th President – it was alleged this was a veiled assassination threat. Comey has denied this, saying the prosecution is politically motivated.

After Donald Trump fired me as FBI director in 2017, I wanted to write about my career in an effort to say something useful – first about leadership, and then about the way in which the US Department of Justice should act.

In 2018’s A Higher Loyalty, I explained that Trump was a deeply unethical leader who demanded my personal loyalty as FBI director, something I couldn’t give and still remain true to the rule of law. It was also something I tried to explain to him at our White House dinner for two, the one that likely sealed my fate.

In January 2021, just days after the assault on the United States Capitol, I published Saving Justice, another story-driven book that offered a roadmap to restoring the values of the Department of Justice, which had been deeply corroded by Trump and his acolytes.

I thought that was it, book-wise, until my editor started nudging me to consider crime fiction. He said I wrote well, and had an eye for detail and narrative and pacing. Lovely, I said, but it’s not for me. What I didn’t say was that I considered crime fiction to be beneath me, that there was something off about making stuff up after a career spent trying to find facts and tell the truth. But he was right and I was very wrong.

Once I tried writing fiction, I realised that I could use it to show readers worlds I had known and reveal truths about the way things worked in the justice system – among them, that the character of leaders is indispensable to a system in which lying and self-delusion are temptations on all sides. And that America’s ubiquitous depictions of Lady Justice with a blindfold mean something, in a system where wealth or race or political opposition will otherwise corrupt, and in which prosecutors must be the servant of only the facts and the law; when they are not, innocent people get charged, something I know from very personal and recent experience.

The characters and stories were fictional, but the problems and the way the characters dealt with them were real. And I could help readers feel the inside of the FBI or a courtroom just as I had experienced those places as a lawyer, Justice Department leader, and FBI director, working under three presidents.

I’ve loved to write since I was a child, and even thought about becoming a journalist. But I could remember the precise date on which I last wrote fiction: It was 40 years earlier, on the evening of 28 October, 1977. I was finishing a piece for my secondary school’s literary magazine when a gunman kicked in the door of my parents’ home in the New York City suburbs and held my brother and me captive during a terrifying hour in which we escaped, were caught, and escaped again, successfully. It left me with a lasting appreciation for how near death was and a related sense that so much we fret over is not worth the worry. Serious stuff for a teenager. From that moment on, I lived in a non-fiction world.

And yet I was a bit stuck as I worked on my first novel, Central Park West, published in 2023. The plan was for my protagonist to be a younger me – a 30-ish, tall Manhattan federal prosecutor. I liked him, for obvious reasons, but I didn’t want to write a fictionalised memoir. So I found myself staring at the laptop screen as I sat alone in our faculty-housing apartment near Columbia University in upper Manhattan. It was quiet – my wife, Patrice, was downtown at the United States courthouse watching our eldest child prosecute Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in abusing young girls.

Maurene was a federal prosecutor in the same office where I had once worked. She was part of the Epstein team — until he killed himself — and then ran the investigation that led to Maxwell’s indictment. Now she was on her feet in the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse explaining Maxwell’s guilt to a jury. Maurene had arranged a seat for my wife in the packed courtroom 318, but she had banned me. “If you go, Dad, it will be a thing.” She never defined “a thing”, but I took her meaning. I would be a distraction, so Patrice would attend and come back at day’s end to tell me all about it.

Instead of writing, I daydreamed about courtroom 318 and tried to imagine what Maurene was doing in that place where cameras were forbidden. I knew 318 well because I spent every weekday there for six months in 1993 prosecuting mobsters John and Joe Gambino.

The courtroom was like an architecture class final exam – 30-foot-high dark-stained oak walls with round arches and fluted Ionic pilasters supporting an acre of cream-coloured ceiling, which was blazingly lit by recessed spotlights and divided by elaborate moulding into dozens of rectangular coffers. Four enormous brass and cast-ivory bowl-pendant lights hung menacingly from the ceiling, ready to drop on anyone who disrespected the gods of justice. If looking up didn’t freak you out, a glance at the bottom of the walls might. There, the architect had chosen to wrap the room in 10ft-high grey-on-black marble panelling, as if to prevent people from escaping by digging through the wood walls. It was cavernous and over-the-top with institutional symbolism.

Remembering the room made me smile. Patrice had watched me there in 1993, after arranging childcare for four-year-old Maurene and her younger sister. And then it hit me: my protagonist needed to be a tall, female prosecutor working for the United States government in Manhattan, a character I would craft from my oldest child, of course, but also endow with aspects of my other four kids. With that, Nora Carleton was born and I was no longer writing about me; I was writing about my children. The change unlocked something in me.

And for Nora’s sidekick, I created Benny Dugan, a giant investigator with a deep Brooklyn-accented voice. That required no imagination at all because Benny was Kenny McCabe, my dear friend and a legend among organised crime investigators, who sat through the Gambino trial with me for those six months in 318. Kenny died from melanoma in 2006 at age 56 and I helped carry his heavy casket at the funeral. With fingers on my laptop keyboard, I can close my eyes and hear what Kenny would say in any scene I’m writing. I can see him slumped in a chair with his long legs stretched out, revealing the gun that was always holstered on his perpetually sockless ankle. I can hear him say: “You know, I’m not as good a person as you think I am,” to which I was required to reply: “Who says I think you’re a good person?”

Because I write about things I knew well being done by people I loved, writing crime fiction became a labour of love. Nora and Benny have battled the Mafia, a hedge-fund murderer, white supremacist terror and, most recently in Red Verdict, Russian espionage. All four books have been centred in the New York area, but in Red Verdict I’ve had them visit Washington DC, although I’m loath to have them spend too much time, just yet, in a place that currently feels awful.

They may live there eventually, , as I did for nearly 20 years,, and maybe Nora will take some big job in Justice or the FBI, but I’d like America to be in a healthier place first.

Red Verdict by James Comey will be published by Head of Zeus in hardback, eBook and audio on 4 June