U.S. will survive Trump, fired FBI director tells Winnipeg audience

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This article was published 28/05/2019 (2513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey brought an optimistic message about the future of the United States to Winnipeg on Tuesday.

He directly referenced the tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump, who fired Comey in 2017 as the FBI investigated Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. federal election.

“It must be depressing for those of you who live in Canada to look south and watch us, but I want to console you a little bit, in a weird way: we are going to be OK,” said Comey, who added that the history of the United States has been “far more screwed up than this.”

“Somehow, American values, that ballast at the centre of our nation, always rights us,” Comey told a crowd of nearly 700 in his keynote speech to the Western Canada Information Security Conference at the RBC Convention Centre.

Comey, who served as deputy attorney general during the George W. Bush administration before being nominated for FBI director by president Barack Obama, compared Trump unfavourably to his White House predecessors in the speech that focused on leadership.

Unlike Bush and Obama, Comey said, Trump lacks a key attribute for an effective leader: the confidence to have a sense of humour.

“I have never seen Donald Trump laugh, ever,” said Comey, who described that as “a sign of a leader who is deeply insecure.”

Comey, who penned the 2018 memoir A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, sprinkled his address with self-deprecating humour, admitting to the crowd that it was “never one of my goals to be an unemployed celebrity.”

But during a subsequent Q&A session with TV personality Amber MacArthur, the ex-FBI director suggested he’s motivated by a desire to defend the concept of objective truth in an age of politicized misinformation.

“A president lies so much that we start becoming numb to it, and disregarding the central norm of our public life in the United States, that is, that we hold leaders accountable to the truth,” he said.

Bush and Obama also lied to the public during their terms, but they were tethered to the touchstone of truth, he said.

“The danger we face today in the States is there’s such a tidal wave of lies that it risks washing away that touchstone like a sand castle at the beach. So the rest of us just give up, we become numb to it,” he said.

Comey said he sometimes feels that apathy himself, but called it a mistake.

“If there’s goodness — and I believe there is in this era — it’s all of us realizing that every one of us owns that touchstone (of truth), and must speak about it, stand up for it and defend it.”

solomon.israel@freepress.mb.ca

@sol_israel