Prior to his abrupt firing in May by President Trump, former FBI
Director James Comey had been known for engaging in high-profile conflicts with
top government officials. When he testifies Thursday before the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence about his interactions with Trump, some will likely
be reminded of his many publicized decisions before and during his time as head
of the FBI.
Despite
his often affable personality, Comey's has made adversaries on both sides of
the political aisle. Eleven days before the 2016 presidential
election, Comey raised eyebrows when decided to reopen the case against Hillary
Clinton over her handling of classified information on her email server as
secretary of state during the Obama administration.
He would
once again close the case, but to Clinton and her supporters the damage was
already done. In May, Clinton told CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour at a Women
for Women International event in New York that "if the election had been
on October 27, I would be your president."
Comey
would later turn his focus to the Trump campaign and its possible coordination
with Russia ahead of the election. In March, Comey confirmed to the House
Intelligence Committee that an investigation was underway into whether Russia
interfered with the election and whether Trump officials communicated with
Moscow officials. He also affirmed that there was “no information” to support
Trump’s allegation that President Barack Obama wiretapped him.
But there
has been more to Comey's nearly four years in office that just dealing with
Clinton and Trump.
Comey
As A Prosecutor
In 1996,
Comey served as Deputy Special Counsel of the Special Committee to Investigate
Whitewater Development Corporation, investigating allegations that President
Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton were involved in a fraudulent Arkansas land
deal.
In 2003,
he brought charges against celebrity businesswoman and television
personality Martha Stewart of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and securities
fraud linked to selling stock in ImClone Systems, a biopharmaceutical company.
Stewart was ultimately convicted on all counts and sentenced to five months in
prison in West Virginia.
Bush
Wiretapping
One highly publicized testimony involved Comey
when he served as deputy to Attorney General John Ashcroft. In March 2004,
he confronted top members of the Bush administration in a showdown over illegal
wiretapping.
Ashcroft
was recovering from gallbladder surgery at a Washington hospital
when White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and President Bush's chief of
staff Andrew Card showed up to persuade the attorney general to
reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department
had just determined was illegal.
Comey
raced to the hospital to head off Gonzales and Card. However, when Comey
made it to his side, Ashcroft made it clear he would not grant his approval for
the program.
"I
was angry," Comey told Congress in May 2007. "I thought I just
witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the
powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."
FBI
Director In The Obama Administration
By the
time President Obama nominated him as the FBI director in 2013, Comey had
developed a strong reputation as a straight-shooting non-partisan investigator,
leading to an overwhelming 93-1 confirmation by the Senate.
He
continued to buck partisan norms as FBI Director, making controversial
statements about everything from waterboarding, racial profiling, to the
Holocaust.
In July
2013, Comey took a hard stance against waterboarding, defining it as
"torture," "illegal," and outlined to lawmakers how he had
bold reservations over the Bush administration's endorsement of the practice.
"When
I first learned about waterboarding, when I became deputy attorney general, my
reaction as a citizen and a leader was: This is torture. It's still what I
think," Comey told Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont at his confirmation
hearing before the Judiciary Committee.
In
February 2015, Comey made a speech at Georgetown University that condemned
police brutality and addressed the "hard truths" of the lessons
learned from violence between "communities of color" and the
police in Ferguson, Missouri.
"Unfortunately
in places like Ferguson, in New York City and in some communities across this
nation, there is a disconnect between police agencies and the citizens they
serve, predominately in communities of color," Comey said.
"Serious debates are taking place about how law enforcement personnel
relate to the communities they serve, about the appropriate use of force."
He also
contradicted the Obama administration when he said that there was a
"Ferguson effect." Comey claimed that police officers getting caught
in viral YouTube videos hindered their response to violent
crime and resulted in an uptick in crime.
In April
2015, he made a controversial speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
referring to the "murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and
Hungary, and so many, many other places" during World War II, which
the President of Poland Bronislaw Komorowski called "an insult to
thousands of Poles who helped Jews."
Comey
vs. Silicon Valley And Privacy
In
October 2014, Comey argued against Apple and Google encrypting smartphones data
to prevent accessibility to law enforcement.
"We’re
seeing more and more cases where we believe significant evidence is on that
phone or a laptop, but we can’t crack the password," Comey said in a
speech at the Brookings Institute. "If this becomes the norm, I
would suggest to you that homicide cases could be stalled, suspects could walk
free, and child exploitation might not be discovered or prosecuted. Justice may
be denied, because of a locked phone or an encrypted hard drive."
In
February 2016, Comey wanted to have the unlocked iPhone of one of the terrorist
shooters in San Bernardino, California, that left 14 dead and 22 injured, with
Apple refusing to cooperate with the FBI.
"The
San Bernardino litigation isn’t about trying to set a precedent or send any
kind of message,” Comey wrote in a national security blog. "We simply
want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s
passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a
decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption
or set a master key loose on the land."
FBI Director James Comey waits before
testifying at a House Intelligence Committee hearing into alleged Russian
meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, on Capitol Hill.
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