FDR Drive

Author Bio: James Comey

James Comey is a former US civil servant and author whose first book, the #1 New York Times bestseller A Higher Loyalty, was made into a Showtime limited series, “The Comey Rule.” He had served as the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2013 until May 9, 2017, when he was fired by Donald Trump.

A Yonkers, New York native, he attended the College of William and Mary and the University of Chicago Law School and then returned to New York and joined the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as an assistant US attorney. There, he took on numerous crimes, most notably organized crime in the case of the United States v. John Gambino, et al. He then became an assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, where he handled the high-profile case that followed the 1996 terrorist attack on the US military’s Khobar Towers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

He returned to New York after 9/11 to become the US attorney for the Southern District of New York. At the end of 2003, he was tapped to be deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice under then Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Comey left the Department of Justice in 2005 to serve as General Counsel and Senior Vice President at defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Five years later, he joined Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment fund, as its general counsel. In early 2013,he became a lecturer in law, a senior research scholar, and Hertog Fellow in National Security Law at Columbia Law School.

After he was fired as FBI Director, he held the King Lecture Chair in Public Policy at Howard University for 2017-18 and served as a distinguished lecturer in public policy at the College of William and Mary for 2018-2019. In September 2020, his first book, A Higher Loyalty, was made into a Showtime limited series, “The Comey Rule.”