Would Hillary Clinton be in the White House – and the world a better place – if not for the former FBI director? He talks conscience, regret, and why the US public will vote Trump out

Are there times, in the dead of night, just after Donald Trump has appalled the world with some newly horrific act, when James Comey is gripped by the dreaded thought: It was me who put that man in power?

The answer Comey gives is unexpectedly swift and direct. “Yes, actually. Mostly because people say that to me all the time. So I hear that quite a bit.” And what does he do with that thought? “It’s very painful. And I sometimes wonder, if I could go back in time, would I do something deeply unprincipled? I wouldn’t. All it does is make it painful, [because] I think Donald Trump is doing – and will do – great damage to my country. But that just adds to the pain.”

It has been 13 months since Trump fired Comey from the job he loved, as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Comey only learned he had been sacked as he was addressing FBI agents in Los Angeles, when the news flashed across TV screens at the back of the room.) Out of office he might be, but he is rarely out of the news. When he and I met this week – in Berlin, as Comey promotes European editions of his well-reviewed and bestselling memoir, A Higher Loyalty – the former FBI director was dealing with the fallout of last week’s report by the inspector general of the Justice Department into the two pivotal decisions Comey took in 2016, decisions that seemed first to save the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and then to bury it.

In July of that year, Comey stepped forward to announce that a year-long investigation into Clinton’s use of email was over and that the candidate would face no charges. Republicans denounced him as a Democrat stooge. But then, in late October and less than two weeks before election day, Comey revealed that the FBI had reopened the email investigation and that Clinton was once again under suspicion. Republicans now rushed to praise Comey as a man of great integrity, the polls promptly narrowed and, on 8 November, Trump won the presidency.

The report backed Comey on the decision not to prosecute Clinton, but it faults the way he broke from standard FBI procedures in making those July and October disclosures himself, rather than deferring to his bosses at the Department of Justice. The inspector general brands Comey’s failure to inform Justice that he was going to make a public statement in July 2016 “extraordinary and insubordinate”.

Surely for a fastidious servant of the law like Comey – such a boy scout that he once felt compelled to tell a colleague that a gift of a necktie was, in fact, a “re-gift” of an unwanted present from his brother-in-law – that kind of condemnation hit hard?

“Look, the term insubordination when I first saw it threw me. I’m like: ‘What?’ But in a way, he’s right. That if you define insubordination in that I intentionally deprived my superior of information that they would otherwise have wanted, yeah, that’s true. And I did it because I thought it was the thing that I had to do. Once I stepped back from it I realised, yeah, it’s actually a fair description.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Comey on his way to testify at the senate hearing on Russian interference in the US election. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

It’s a typical Comey answer: emotionally self-aware; self-critical; striving to be fair and to see his opponent’s point of view; insistent on logic and, after all that, still convinced of his own ultimate moral rectitude. His certainty on that score is conveyed as much through his demeanour as his words. In the hotel room set aside for interviews, surrounded by multiple editions of his book waiting to be signed, he looks relaxed in loose jacket and no tie – “He’s dressing as a writer,” his German publicist suggests – and if guilt and angst are gnawing away, there is no outward sign of it.

I don’t feel chastened. It’s painful to see yourself criticised like that but, in the end, I’m at peace with it

Instead he speaks as a man who wrestled hard with the decisions he had to make, and has wrestled with them in the months since, but has declared himself the winner. He is not tortured by regret. As he says of last week’s report: “I don’t feel chastened by it. Initial reaction was defensive, I think, a little bit. It’s painful to see yourself criticised like that but, in the end, I’m at peace with it.”

What of the revelation that he himself had used a private Gmail account to do some of his FBI work, a disclosure that brought a three-word tweet – and viral rebuke – from Hillary Clinton: “But my emails”? Didn’t that make him a hypocrite?

Not at all, he says. “I worried throughout the investigation that Hillary Clinton didn’t understand what her own investigation was about,” he says, risking condescension to explain that the issue was never what kind of email she was using – “I could [not] care less that she was using her own server or Gmail or AOL” or whatever – but rather “the mishandling of classified information”. For his own part, he says he used Gmail only when working at home on public texts, speeches and the like, which he would then send to his official FBI account. “There’s no accusation whatsoever that I used my Gmail account to discuss classified topics.”

How did he react to the inspector general’s discovery that two FBI agents were texting each other about the campaign, one reassuring the other not to worry about a Trump victory because “We’ll stop it”?

Comey says he was “stunned when I heard that stuff”. He had no idea the two agents involved were talking that way, or that they were in a relationship with each other. Had he known, he says he would have removed them immediately from their role in “any sensitive investigation”.

He is puzzled, he adds, because the agent who wrote “We’ll stop it” also helped Comey draft the October disclosure statement that damaged Clinton so badly. “If he was in Hillary Clinton’s camp, why was he doing that? This is the thing that the Trump people have trouble explaining. If the FBI was a Clinton tool, why didn’t we disclose the Russia investigation?”

It’s a good question.

Given that Comey was, as last week’s report makes clear, happy to break FBI protocols in the Clinton case, why didn’t he break them to reveal before election day that the Bureau was looking into possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign? Then at least he could rest easy, knowing he had hurt both Clinton and Trump equally.

“It never even came into a conversation,” he says. “People tend to talk about it like there was an investigation of Hillary and there was an investigation of Donald.” But that wasn’t true, not then. “The candidate was not the subject” of the investigation, he explains. Nor even was the Trump campaign. All it was, at that stage, says Comey, was a preliminary investigation of four individuals. To reveal that a probe was under way would have damaged the investigation. Besides, “I don’t know what you could responsibly have told the American people that wouldn’t have been tremendously unfair to a candidate who was not being investigated.”

I’m about to move on, but there’s something else that bothers me. In the book, Comey says he made his October statement in part because he feared that, if he didn’t, and Clinton won, there would be a cloud cast over the legitimacy of her presidency. Americans would feel they had not been in full possession of the facts when they voted for her.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Happier times? With Donald Trump before he was sacked. Photograph: Harrer/POOL/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

But wasn’t that hugely naive? Wouldn’t the Republicans and their conservative media outriders have branded President Hillary as illegitimate from day one whatever Comey had done, just as they had with her husband and Barack Obama?

“Of course, the Republicans and Fox News – any Democrat as president they’re going to attack. But it’s an order of magnitude different if the basis of the attack on the FBI is that we concealed [the facts] from the American people and thereby engineered her election as president of the United States … Even without the Fox News voices, a reasonable American, I think, would be stunned” to learn that the FBI had reopened the email probe and not let on.

Some of Comey’s detractors believe his motives were much less high-minded, that he kept inserting himself into the 2016 campaign not solely to maintain the integrity of the FBI, but for his own self-preservation. The inspector general hints at that when he writes that Comey based his decisions on “what he believed was in the FBI’s institutional interests and would enable him to continue to effectively lead the FBI as its director”. So: did ego play a part?

“The honest answer is I don’t think so, in part because I knew how much this was going to suck for me. And I knew by choosing especially to speak that it was going to be bad for me personally. I think that’s a pretty good indication that it wasn’t about protecting myself. The knowledge that I was screwed, I think, is a pretty good indicator that wasn’t the case.”

It’s now his predecessor as FBI director who is in the frame, as the world awaits Robert Mueller’s report into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Comey warns Trump’s opponents not to get their hopes up.

For one thing, he says, we don’t know what Mueller will find. The truth might not be the “particular set of facts” people want it to be. (I ask if, based on what he knows, it is plausible that Russia actively meddled in the Brexit referendum. Intriguingly, he answers: “I think it’s plausible and consistent with their recent behaviour in the United States and a longstanding pattern. But I don’t know enough and if I knew, I couldn’t say it anyway. So I can’t talk about that.”) For another, it is “entirely possible” that even if the facts against Trump are damning, he won’t be impeached or removed because Republicans control both houses of Congress.

He sets out instead his alternative hope, which he acknowledges some might find odd. “I almost hope that the American people are not relieved of their obligation to go to the polls in 2020 and decide what the values of the American president should be.” He worries that impeachment would short-circuit a necessary process, and would at the same time “risk driving a division into our country that would be long lasting … If it’s outsourced [to Congress], it’ll feed a narrative that there was a coup by the deep state and blah, blah, blah.” Better that Americans get rid of Trump themselves, at the ballot box.

But will they? “I’m optimistic that, as the conversation continues in our country, which I’m trying to be part of for the next two and a half years, the sleeping giant will be awakened. I think of America as a bell curve. There’s wingnuts at either end and then the great lump in the middle is everybody else. And they’re busy and distracted and that giant, that lump, only awakens every so often in America. And I think the giant is stirring. I think the giant is stirred by images of children.”

When you stare at children crying, it forces your eyes above statutes and numbers, to ask: ‘What kind of people are we?'

He has brought us to the infants and babies separated from their parents at the US border. For him, those images have recalled the internment of Japanese-Americans during the second world war, but also pictures of black children being bitten by police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama during the civil rights struggles in the 1960s. “The giant awakened in our country in 1963 and 1964 and that changed our country. Martin Luther King wrote to that giant in Letter from Birmingham Jail, basically saying: ‘You busy, moderate people need to get in the game.’ And that happens every so often in American history. Again, I could be convincing myself of this, but I think the giant is awakening.

Play Video 1:48 Children separated from parents cry at US detention centre – audio

“When you stare at children crying, being taken away from their mothers, it forces your eyes above statutes and numbers, to: ‘What kind of people are we, for God’s sakes?’ That’s a lifting of the national eyes that is powerful and potentially the kind of inflection point that I’m talking about. That’s the kind of thing that awakens the giant.”

I ask about Trump’s threat to pardon himself and everyone else linked to the Russia scandal. Is the rule of law in danger in America? I expect him to equivocate, or to tell me I’m getting carried away. But his answer is clear.

“Yes. Yes. Not in the long run, because we will recover. But if we’re not attuned to the damage that’s being done to it right now, the recovery will take longer.” He cites Trump’s demands that political opponents, including Comey, be locked up – uncharted territory for a US president.

Still, Comey clings to the view that, in the end, America will right itself. There have been low points before, he says. “In the 1920s, one third of our congress were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Joe McCarthy reigned in America from 1950 to 1954.” But America recovered.

Is Trump in that category, along with McCarthyism and the Klan? “I think he should be understood as channelling the forces of reaction to change in the United States.” Is he as great a menace? “We’ll only be able to judge in hindsight, I suppose, but certainly not if the giant awakens and we resist the temptation to become numb to the norm-destroying behaviours.”

Comey promises to be active between now and the 2020 election, writing and speaking, perhaps even backing political candidates. He is no longer a registered Republican; he is now an independent. Would he run himself? That “is not something I’m ever going to do,” he declares. He says that he’d be a “crappy candidate”. He would hate asking people for money; he would baulk at saying contradictory things to different audiences; if an opponent made a good point in a debate, he would say so.

You never know, I say: those very qualities might be appealing to voters. “The other thing is, I’m actually a bit of an introvert. I don’t get energy from public engagement. I don’t crave affirmation, crave attention. You’ve got to have a little bit of that in you.”

Our time is nearly up. In our last minute together, I say that, if I were in his shoes, I would spend every waking hour scouring polling data and the like, searching for evidence that it wasn’t my fault that Hillary Clinton lost. I would need that.

He wasn’t like that in the immediate aftermath of the election, he says. “I was just trying to block it out at the time. I think I felt a certain sense of numbness. Since then, I’ve actually delegated all that to my wife – she was a strong Hillary Clinton supporter – because she’s very keen to find evidence that it wasn’t me. She would very much like to find some definitive study that it wasn’t me.”

And has she found it?

“Not yet.”