[10][11][12] 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.

[44] In April 2003, he led the indictment of Frank Quattrone, who allegedly urged subordinates in 2000 to destroy evidence sought by investigators looking into his investment banking practices at Credit Suisse First Boston.

[45] In June 2003, he revealed "Operation Project Meltdown", which started in January 1999 by the El Dorado Task Force, that found a money laundering scheme avoiding suspicious activity reports (SARS) from banks in which very large amounts of both gold and diamonds from West 47th Street jewelers in New York City were shipped to Colombia as profits of a Colombian narcotics cartel.

[52] Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to be the special counsel to head the grand jury investigation into the Plame affair after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself.

[55] In early March 2004, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Comey had prepared their resignations if the White House overruled the DOJ's finding that the program was unconstitutional.

[60][61][62][63][64][65] Mueller's notes on the March 10, 2004, incident, which were released to a House Judiciary committee, confirm that he "Saw (the) AG, John Ashcroft in the room (who was) feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed.

[76] In August 2005, it was announced that Comey would enter the private sector, becoming the general counsel and senior vice president for Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Department of Defense's largest contractor.

[81] He was also appointed to the board of directors of the London-based financial institution HSBC Holdings,[82] to improve the company's compliance program after its $1.9 billion settlement with the Justice Department for failing to comply with basic due diligence requirements for money laundering regarding Mexican drug cartels and terrorism financing.

[88][86]: 17 Politico reported in May 2009, White House officials pushed for Comey's inclusion on the short list of names to replace Associate Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court.

[92][93] Comey was reportedly chosen over another finalist, Lisa Monaco, who had overseen national security issues at the Justice Department during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.

[98] Comey stated:Police officers on patrol in our nation's cities often work in environments where a hugely disproportionate percentage of street crime is committed by young men of color.

[98]In October 2015, Comey gave a speech in which he raised concerns that body worn video results in less effective policing; this opinion contradicted the President's public position.

[103] After The Washington Post printed a version of his speech, Anne Applebaum wrote that his reference to "the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary" was inaccurately saying that Poles were as responsible for the Holocaust as Germans.

[8] On June 29, 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who was Comey's boss, and Bill Clinton met aboard her plane on the tarmac of the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, leading to calls for her recusal.

[8] On July 5, 2016, Comey announced the FBI's recommendation that the United States Department of Justice file no criminal charges relating to the Hillary Clinton email controversy.

[113] During a 15-minute press conference in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, Comey called Secretary Clinton's and her top aides' behavior "extremely careless", but concluded that "no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case".

[133][134] On May 2, 2017, Clinton told CNN's Christiane Amanpour: "I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey's letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off.

"[135] On May 3, 2017, Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that it "makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election", but that "honestly, it wouldn't change the decision" to release the information.

[141] In September 2017, two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), alleged that Comey planned to exonerate Clinton in her email scandal long before the agency had completed its investigation.

[146] Specifically, he stated that Comey made "a serious error in judgment", "usurped the authority of the Attorney General", "chose to deviate" from established procedures, and engaged "in his own subjective, ad hoc decision making" by publicly announcing that he wouldn't recommend any charges in the Clinton email investigation in July 2016 and later by sending a letter to Congress about reopening the case.

[152] During the hearing, the White House Twitter account posted "The NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence the electoral process", which Comey, when he was read the tweet by Congressman Jim Himes, directly refuted.

[167] In a November 2014 New York Times Magazine article, Yale historian Beverly Gage reported that Comey kept on his desk a copy of the FBI request to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. "as a reminder of the bureau's capacity to do wrong".

[172] Trump reportedly called Deputy Director Andrew McCabe the next day, demanding to know why Comey had been allowed to fly back to Washington on an FBI jet after he had been fired.

"[19][187][188][189] According to reports, Trump had been openly talking to aides about finding a reason to fire Comey for at least a week before both the dismissal and the request of memoranda from Sessions and Rosenstein the day prior.

Trump was angry and frustrated when, in the week prior to his dismissal, Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia's effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

It was compared to the Saturday Night massacre, President Richard Nixon's termination of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been investigating the Watergate scandal,[202][203] and to the firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates in January 2017.

[216][217] In June 2018, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had received a referral from the FBI regarding Comey's release of his Trump meeting memos to Daniel Richman, parts of which were classified "confidential" after the fact.

"[219] In a second report released August 29, 2019, IG Horowitz found that Comey violated agency policies when he retained a set of memos he wrote documenting meetings with President Donald Trump early in 2017, and caused one of them to be leaked to the press.

[223] The Times reported in November 2022 that Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly said the president told him Comey and McCabe were among his perceived political enemies he wanted to "get the IRS on".

"[241] In a May 2019 op-ed published in the New York Times, as Attorney General William Barr was scheduled to be questioned in congressional hearings, Comey wrote: "Accomplished people lacking inner strength can't resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from.