Senate approves James Comey for FBI Director

Susan Davis | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Senate approved President Obama's nomination of James Comey to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Senate voted 93-1 Monday to confirm Comey, who will succeed Robert Mueller in the post. Two senators voted present.

His nomination received bipartisan support after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., withdrew his hold on the nomination after the FBI responded Monday to Paul's questions on domestic use of surveillance drones.

Comey, 52, served as deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush but earned support on both sides of the aisle for his 2004 role in scuttling efforts in the Bush White House to pursue a domestic surveillance program that the Justice Department deemed illegal.

During his confirmation hearing earlier this month before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey testified that he views water-boarding as torture and advocated against it during his previous tenure at Justice. "If I were FBI director, we would never have anything to do with that," he told senators.

Comey also broadly defended the gathering of metadata by the National Security Agency as a valuable counter-terrorism tool, but said he is unaware of the details of current programs revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

After leaving the Justice Department in 2005, Comey worked for a number of companies including Lockheed Martin and Bridgewater Associates, a Westport, Conn., hedge fund. Earlier this year he served as a non-executive director to HSBC bank. Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "it would be a conflict" for him to deal with HSBC as FBI director, and would recuse himself from any dealings the FBI could potentially have with the bank.

The FBI director serves a fixed, 10-year term, but President Obama sought and received Senate approval to extend Mueller's term for an additional two years in 2011.