Saving Justice ★★★☆☆

Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust (Click Here To Buy)

★★★☆☆

Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust by James Comey is a memoir about Comey’s career from a prosecutor to the director of the FBI. Comey was famously dismissed from his position by Trump in 2017.

I read this as an audiobook on loan from the library and read by the author.

Comey starts out with when he was just a judicial clerk and tells of how he decided he wanted to become a US attorney, fighting on the side of truth. Comey address major cases and learning opportunities that he had in his career, specifically focusing on telling the truth - including revealing all your evidence as a lawyer even if that evidence seems like it will not change the case - because that’s how you get a fair trial. It was entertaining to listen to the cases he remembered most from major crime busts to prison escapes and learning a bit about how witness protection works but overall a lot of it felt kind of random and didn’t seamlessly fit together.

Even though a memoir of sorts, the book does not focus on Comey’s personal life or feelings. He simply glosses over the death of his child and his fight with cancer, limiting them to a handful of sentences, which feels weird because those are both pretty big deals in a person’s life and makes me question him a bit.

I appreciate what Comey has to say about truth including the importance of telling it as well as admitting when you’ve done something wrong - it’s just that there are some things that he did do that I just don’t agree with. For example, as a judicial clerk, he stole the judges shoes and went to the beach never getting caught or seeming to discuss moral implications. Another time his security pulled over an author his daughter liked so they could get a picture. This made me laugh and at the same time I was like, but is that right?

Comey wrote a book right before this called A Higher Loyalty, which it seems like people liked better than this book. I read that people felt this book covered a lot of the same ground that the other book did. I didn’t know about that book prior to reading this one, had I, I think I probably would have read it first. Now that I do know that, I’m not sure whether I’ll read it based on what people said. Who’s read both, what do you think?

If you liked Saving Justice, I also recommend Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, Our Time is Now by Stacey Abrams, The Ferguson Report by the US Department of Justice, and The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama.

Happy Sunday Reading,

Ms.Bjork