JAMES COMEY, FBI DIRECTOR 2013-2017: He was asking for loyalty.

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Did he ask for it that directly?

JAMES COMEY: Yes.

LEIGH SALES: And what did you say when he asked for that?

JAMES COMEY: I said nothing. I just stared at him while a little voice was inside my head saying, "Don't move, don't say anything, don't move."

Given his background as a deal-maker, he might assume I am trying to gain leverage over him.

LEIGH SALES: Is that what you were doing? Didn't sending that memo turn you into a political player?

JAMES COMEY: I thought somebody has to go and get the tapes. If I had a magic wand, Hillary Clinton would never have had a private email server and Anthony Weiner would never have had a laptop but ...

LEIGH SALES: Hello and welcome to this special edition of 7.30 coming from New York.

American politics is always colourful and full of intrigue but rarely has the country seen an administration as tumultuous as the one run by the current US President, Donald Trump.

One of the most jaw-dropping moments of his presidency, and there've been a few, was the sacking of the FBI director, James Comey, in May last year.

Comey has been a thorn in Trump's side ever since, including with the high-profile publication of his memoir this week. It's called "A Higher Loyalty".

I sat down with James Comey in New York earlier today but first, here's a reminder of why he's one of the most divisive and influential FBI directors in American history.

DONALD TRUMP, US PRESIDENT: A very strong and powerful order.

LEIGH SALES: In the middle of one of the most incredible presidential election campaigns in history was this man, FBI director, James Comey.

The FBI was running two investigations at the time. One very public probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while Secretary of State.

HILLARY CLINTON: I do take responsibility for having made what is clearly not the best decision.

LEIGH SALES: And another secret inquiry into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

DONALD TRUMP: I never met Putin, I don't know who Putin is. He said one nice thing about me, he said I'm a genius.

LEIGH SALES: The FBI had concluded there was no criminality in Clinton's email use.

JAMES COMEY: No charges are appropriate in this case.

LEIGH SALES: But then, just days before the election, James Comey announced the FBI was reopening the case.

HILLARY CLINTON: Bang, out of nowhere comes this inexplicable letter, even today in my thinking.

DONALD TRUMP: I, Donald John Trump, do ...

LEIGH SALES: Behind the scenes the FBI was still investigating the possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

When Trump first became President he seemed to be drawing Comey close.

But things rapidly turned sour and in May last year Comey learned Trump had sacked him by seeing it on television.

DONALD TRUMP: He's a showboat, he's a grandstander.

LEIGH SALES: But James Comey has refused to go quietly. First, testifying before Congress, and now releasing an explosive memoir.

James Comey, thank you very much for joining us.

JAMES COMEY: It's great to be with you.

LEIGH SALES: I want you to start by taking us back to January 2017 and your first meeting with the President-elect. What was the key item on the agenda and what was it like to come face to face with Donald Trump?

JAMES COMEY: I was there at Trump Tower, January 6th of 2017. So when President Trump was President-elect Trump at President Obama's direction with the leaders of the CIA, the NSA and the Director of National Intelligence, to brief the President-elect and his new team on what the intelligence community, the US intelligence community's conclusion was about Russian interference in the election and to tell him that they had an extensive campaign to damage the American democracy, to hurt Hillary Clinton and to help Donald Trump and so we laid that out to his team.

And as I recount in the book, the reaction he had and of his team was largely focused on can we say it had no effect on the election? You agree it had no effect on the election?

And that was an analysis that the US intelligence community hadn't done and wasn't qualified to do.

LEIGH SALES: At the end of that meeting you spoke alone with President Trump so you could brief him on the so-called Steele Dossier. It was research conducted by a private firm into Trump's ties to Russia, which included some very sensitive information about Russia seeing him as a potential target because of his alleged sexual behaviour in Moscow.

How did Donald Trump react when you raised this matter?

JAMES COMEY: I was assigned to brief him privately afterwards. It made sense for me to do it alone although in hindsight it would have been nice to find somebody else but it was information that the FBI had from a reliable, credible source, that potentially could be used to exert influence over the new President.

I didn't know whether it was true, I didn't really care but we wanted him to know this was out there for two reasons.

First, we didn't want to be keeping secrets from the incoming President, especially about something that we thought the media was about to reveal.

And we wanted to do what we call a defensive briefing which is let the person know whether this is true or not, it's out there and often that will defuse the ability of an adversary to use that information.

And his reaction was strongly defensive, which is reasonable and then the conversation started to go off in some awkward directions because I think it was, he had a strongly defensive reaction and I was able to get it back to a place where I made it clear to him that this isn't something that I care about, just wanted him to know about it and the conversation ended shortly after that.

LEIGH SALES: You write that it did cross your mind that Trump may have thought that you were doing a J. Edgar Hoover on him, in other words, signalling to him that the embarrassing Russia dossier would perhaps give you some leverage and power over him.

Is that what you were doing?

JAMES COMEY: Definitely not but I worried because being a human, I know how humans are, we tend to assume people are seeing the world the way we do and my worry was, given his background as a deal-maker and that sort of thing, he might assume I'm trying to gain leverage over him.

It's the reason I was keen, as I saw the conversation spinning off in a bad direction, to say something to him that was true, that we were not investigating him personally and that, I hope, went some way to blunt an assumption that I was up to no good.

LEIGH SALES: Later that same month President Trump invited you to come and have dinner with him, just the two of you, at the White House. What did he want from you at that meeting in your mind?

JAMES COMEY: He wanted me to, in essence, re-apply for my job and pledge personal loyalty to him.

LEIGH SALES: Did he ask for it that directly?

JAMES COMEY: Yes. Near the beginning of the meal he asked for it that directly, exactly that directly saying, "I need loyalty. I expect loyalty" or maybe it was the reverse but he was asking for loyalty.

LEIGH SALES: And what did you say when he asked for that?

JAMES COMEY: I said nothing. I just stared at him.

I was closer to him than you and I are here. The table was a small table and I just stared at him while a little voice was inside my head saying, "Don't move, don't say anything, don't move."

And I know that sounds weird but in the moment that was all I could think of to do because I was so shocked by the fact that a President of the United States would ask the FBI director for loyalty.

LEIGH SALES: At the end of the conversation he raised it again. What did you do on the second occasion?

JAMES COMEY: Second occasion came towards the end, as you said and in between I had tried to interject and interrupt to teach a little bit.

I know that sounds condescending, but to share with him my view that it's important for the FBI to be at a distance from the political leadership for all kinds of reasons and that's the tradition we've built since Watergate and I explained to him how I think about my role.

So that when he returned to it and asked for loyalty again, I responded, "You'll always get honesty from me" and that connected to things I had said earlier and then he paused and he said, "That's what I want, honest loyalty" and I paused, really desperate to find a way to get out of this conversation, I said, "You'll get that from me."

And I think he understood what I meant by that, given the conversation that had happened since we were staring at each other at the beginning.

LEIGH SALES: President Trump on a further occasion asked to speak to you alone as well and this time he raised an investigation into an allegedly improper meeting between his national security advisor, Michael Flynn and Russia's ambassador to Washington.

President Trump said that he hoped you would be able to let it go. What did you take it that he meant by that?

JAMES COMEY: I understood him to be asking me to drop the FBI's criminal investigation of Michael Flynn.

LEIGH SALES: To play devil's advocate, when you look at say the Flynn meeting or the loyalty meeting, this is a guy who had no experience as a politician, as a diplomat, is it possible he just didn't know what the norms of Washington were, that it wasn't something sinister, he just didn't know what the rules were?

JAMES COMEY: It's possible I suppose with respect to the loyalty piece, possible, although you're becoming President of the United States, you would expect the person to find out what the norms would be and I actually helped him understand those norms after the first request for loyalty and before the second.

So I don't think it's fair to say that he didn't know then and with respect to the conversation where he asked me to drop the investigation, if he didn't know it was something he shouldn't be doing, why did he kick everybody else out of the room including the Attorney-General of the United States, my boss.

And so, look, I understand why people would ask that but I don't think that's the better of the perspective on it.

LEIGH SALES: How did you learn that Donald Trump was firing you?

JAMES COMEY: From TV screens. I was in Los Angeles and as I explained in the book I was there to go to a diversity recruiting event, trying to attract more women and more people of colour to the FBI, events that were really successful in other cities and I got to LA early and visited the field office and I walked, as I always did, and visited people at their cubicles and their desk and just thanked them each for their work and I'm in the middle of saying that and explaining the FBI's mission, I look up and it says on big letters on at least one or two of the screens, it says "Comey resigns" and there's are a lot of hilarious people in the FBI, including close to the director so I thought it must be a prank.

So I turned to my staff and I said, "That took a lot of work," and then I went back talking and then it changed and said, "Comey fired" and so I knew that was not a joke.

My team is funny but they don't try to be that funny and I said to the now distracted employees who could see from my face something was going on, I said, "Look, I don't know whether that's true or not, but whether it's true or not, doesn't change what I need to say to you" and then I explained to them how important it was that they continue to pursue the mission of the FBI and then I went to try and find out what was going on.

LEIGH SALES: Supporters of Donald Trump are angry at you, they think that you have a vendetta, that you are after Donald Trump and so forth. I mean that must have been shocking to discover that you were sacked like that.

Is there any merit to the point of view that sent you on a personal path of revenge against Donald Trump?

JAMES COMEY: I get why they would say that. I don't feel that, I don't feel anger towards Donald Trump.

I'm deeply concerned about his leadership, I'm deeply concerned about his attacks on the rule of law in this country and on the FBI and the Justice Department but my reaction actually, in the moment, was kind of confusion, a slight feeling of sick to my stomach and deep sadness.

And in part that was my initial reaction because that was the reaction of the employees. When I stepped out of the office after confirming it was true, lots of employers had gathered in that big space and they were standing there and many of them were crying and so that, and then I started to get emotional and I remembered as a moment of just deep sadness.

LEIGH SALES: After you were sacked you gave a friend a copy of the memo that you made about the Flynn meeting and he shared it with a journalist. You've been at pains to say in your memoir that you believe in independence and integrity.

Didn't sending that memo to land in the media turn you into a political player?

JAMES COMEY: I hope not. I didn't think of it that way. I get why people would criticise it and ask about it but I don't think of it that way.

I thought I need to do something and the President tweeted one morning, "James Comey better hope there aren't tapes before he starts leaking to the media," and I hadn't leaked anything to the media.

I woke up a few days later in the middle of the night and it took a long time for this to dawn on me, realising if there are tapes, he will be heard on that tape asking me to drop a criminal investigation.

There may be corroboration, there may be back-up for my account. Somebody has to go get the tapes and I know the FBI will see it but I honestly didn't trust the leadership of the Department of Justice then to go get the tapes and so I thought I have got to do something to force them to go get them and this is something I can do now that I'm a private citizen.

And so I asked my friend, who is also being my lawyer, to get that information out to the media.

LEIGH SALES: Let me take you back to something that we touched on earlier which was Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election and the Trump campaign's alleged links to Russia.

In July 2016, the FBI opened an investigation into it, what triggered that?

JAMES COMEY: Information that came to the US intelligence community and the FBI that a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor ...

LEIGH SALES: George Papadopoulos?

JAMES COMEY: Right, had months earlier, so before any of it was public, that there were derogatory emails being released.

Months before that, that George Papadopoulos was having conversations with a Russian contact about dirt they had on Hillary Clinton and so that raised the prospect for the first time that this campaign that we were highly confident was going on to influence the election raised the question of whether any Americans were assisting and are conspiring in it.

LEIGH SALES: And George Papadopoulos shared that with Australia's High Commissioner in London, Alexander Downer? Is that correct and it came to you via Australian channels?

JAMES COMEY: Yeah, I can't say that.

LEIGH SALES: Is there anything further that you can tell us about that meeting between Alexander Downer and George Papadopoulos?

JAMES COMEY: I'm not conceding that it was with Alexander Downer.

LEIGH SALES: At around the same time that you received that intelligence, Christopher Steele, a former British MI6 agent, who compiled the Steele Dossier, passed his information on to the FBI.

His report alleged the Trump campaign had accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin and that Russian officials had been cultivating Trump as an asset for about five years including gathering the material about his sexual habits that we discussed earlier.

It also painted a picture of broader and aggressive Russian interference in the election.

Why did the FBI keep the American people in the dark that it was investigating something so significant?

JAMES COMEY: Because we're acting consistent with our approach to investigations of all kinds, especially counterintelligence investigations.

The investigations we began in late July focused on a very small number of Americans, not Donald Trump, trying to understand is there a connection between these Americans and the Russian effort.

And so, it was a counterintelligence investigation that we didn't know what we had and we certainly wouldn't want to tip off the subjects of it that we were looking at it.

And so there was no serious consideration given. I can't even remember a single conversation about whether we should reveal the counterintelligence investigations because it would be utterly inconsistent with our approach.

But there was a lot of discussion about whether we should say something to the American people about the broader Russian influence effort.

LEIGH SALES: Well, this kind of activity, you know, if proven, could rise to the standard of one of the biggest electoral crimes in American history.

As I said the Steele Dossier was very detailed, you had the Papadopoulos information as well.

Why did this not reach the bar where as you say there was even a discussion about sharing it with the American people?

JAMES COMEY: Because we didn't know what we had. So the question I'd ask people, so what would we say?

We'd tell the American people, we can't tell you who they are but there's a few people that we think may have some connection to this. I just don't think that would be appropriate.

We talk a lot in this country about the Hillary Clinton email investigation which we did talk about publicly but that began in public and the former secretary of state was the subject of that investigation - very different posture than an early stage counterintelligence investigation.

LEIGH SALES: I'll come to the Clinton emails in more detail in a second but you do write in your book that there are two exceptions to the no-comment policy on investigations, for investigations of extraordinary public interest or where our investigative activity is apparent to the public.

Surely the Russia investigate met both of those early standards even if it was in its early stages? We're talking about someone who is running for President of the United States here being the subject of these very serious allegations.

JAMES COMEY: Yeah, but that's it. He wasn't the subject of the investigation.

LEIGH SALES: His campaign was though.

JAMES COMEY: Well, people associated with his campaign in a very early stage counterintelligence investigation, actually it would have been irresponsible to talk about it then.

Again, we didn't know whether we had anything and had just started these investigations.

So it would have been an extraordinary departure to talk about them.

We did talk about them in a general way the following spring when they were much farther along but it just, it wouldn't make any sense for us to be talking publicly about an early stage counterintelligence investigation.

Now if the President was the subject of it, maybe you could make an argument differently but I just don't see it with the people we were looking at.

LEIGH SALES: Around the same time that the Russia investigations kicked off in July 2016, you held a press conference about the results of an investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails.

How is it not a double standard that you aired a great deal of information about the investigation into her and not into the Russia one?

JAMES COMEY: Yup, that's a reasonable question and I think our treatment of the two actually illustrates the norm, the standard we try to apply.

The Clinton investigation was public by that point and we were closing it and the secretary had been the subject of it.

The counterintelligence investigations were just starting. In fact, they started three weeks later and were at an incredibly early stage involving not the candidate but people who may be, trying to figure out whether people were working with the Russians around the candidate.

So we're closing an investigation that the public knows we've conducted. It's an investigation of one of the two candidates.

In my judgement and people can disagree about this, is that for the result to be credible, for the Obama administration to be closing an investigation of the Democratic candidate for President of the United States, we needed to offer the American people transparency so they could have confidence that it was done in a competent, honest and independent way.

And without transparency, there would be corrosive doubt about whether it was a political fix and although I'm sure your mother taught you what my mother taught me which is you can't care what other people think about you, when you run an organisation like the FBI and the Justice Department, you have to care that the public has confidence in your work.

And so, my judgement was we need to show the American people, as much as we can under the law and under our policy, to reassure them this was done in a competent way, honest way so they could move on.

LEIGH SALES: If you were concerned at the FBI being seen to be apolitical, why then in that press conference did you describe her behaviour as extreme careless? You could have simply said there's no criminal behaviour here and left it at that.

JAMES COMEY: Yeah, it's a great question and the reason is because I thought the result will not be credible without that transparency.

It was obvious that her behaviour was careless, given that there was classified information on an unclassified system and I thought if I'm not honest with the American people over what we found and then explain to them why we don't think it justifies a recommendation of charges, we would have undercut the credibility of the announcement.

And so, it seemed like an important thing to do again, to facilitate public confidence in the result that this was done well. "Here is what we found. Here is what we think about that. There is no there there, all of us can move on from this."

LEIGH SALES: Something that has also caused incredible controversy was that two weeks before the election you announced that you were reopening that investigation because a new trove of emails had been found on the computer of the husband of one of Hillary Clinton's staffers.

You write in your book assuming as nearly everyone did, that Hillary Clinton would be elected President of the US in less than two weeks, "What would happen to the FBI, the Justice Department or her own presidency if later it was revealed, after the fact, that she was still the subject of an FBI investigation? What if after the election, we actually found information that demonstrated prosecutable criminal activity?"

Despite saying that throughout this period you were concerned with having the FBI seem apolitical, surely that is a clear political calculation that you've made there?

JAMES COMEY: I don't see it that way. I see it as a consideration of what damage will flow to the institutions from possible futures.

LEIGH SALES: That is a political consideration though, isn't it, don't you think?

JAMES COMEY: Well, maybe it is a distinction about the difference but I think public trust and politics are two different things.

I don't remember thinking about politics or making a decision based on polls. In fact, I remember explicitly pushing away the notion that we should consider which candidate would be affected and in which way.

But public trust in the institutions of justice matters and my concern was so which of these two terrible options do I choose? Do I speak about this or do I conceal this?

Having told the American people repeatedly we're done here, you can rely on that. Now we're restarting it and as you say, not in some teeny way. We're restarting this in a hugely significant way.

So which do I do? Which will do the least damage to the institutions of justice? And that's the standard.

I hated the situation we were in. I wish I could have found a door that said here is the good option but the public trust dictated that we have to do the bad thing, not the catastrophic thing.

LEIGH SALES: I understand your point about the stage that the Russia investigation was in and the stage that the Clinton investigation was in but you considered what would happen to the legitimacy of Hillary Clinton's presidency if your investigation was discovered after the election but because you kept the Trump Russia investigation a secret isn't this the exact position in which the US now finds itself, which is a President who may have engaged in prosecutable criminal activity and that the FBI concealed it from the public before the election?

JAMES COMEY: I don't see it that way because I think it would have been highly irresponsible in the summer of 2016 to say to the American people, "We have these classified investigations going on. We don't know what we have. It doesn't involve Donald Trump directly but there's some dirt we're looking in to on the campaign."

I can't imagine any FBI director or Attorney-General making a decision to make an announcement like that - very different than a circumstances where you have a public investigation that you're closing and making an announcement on a very different circumstance when that investigation rears its head on Anthony Weiner's laptop before the election.

So I see the two as very different.

LEIGH SALES: There may be some Americans and indeed people around the world who would see 36 classified emails on a private email server as a way less serious matter than potential Russian interference in an election, possibly involving the campaign of one of the candidates?

JAMES COMEY: Sure, if you had reached a stage in the Russia interference election, where you had hard findings of fact about the role of Americans in conspiring with the Russians.

We had none of that and I don't know where that stand because there still hasn't been any public announcement by the special prosecutor as to who he's investigating and what he's found and it's now another year later.

LEIGH SALES: In terms of the way the Clinton investigation was handled and the way the Russia investigation was handled, would you make a different call on either of those matters with the benefit of hindsight?

JAMES COMEY: In small, not on the Russia investigation, in small ways on the Clinton investigation but on the big decisions of the Clinton investigation, where it was always no win, I think we chose the least bad alternative in each case.

If I had a magic wand, Hillary Clinton would never have had a private email server and Anthony Weiner would never have had a laptop cause I hope I've made clear, I didn't want to be involved at all but once you're involved and you're stuck, you always have to choose the least bad door and that's painful and you know you're going to get hammered for it but you are where you are.

LEIGH SALES: By your decisions in 2016, what part have you personally played in delivering the world a President that you yourself describe as morally unfit for the role?

JAMES COMEY: I don't know. I hope and pray none. It would be wonderful if some day someone makes the case that we had no impact on the election.

The notion that we had an impact on the election makes me sick to my stomach and that's not a commentary on Donald Trump, although I meant the things I've said about Donald Trump. That's a commentary on the fact that what I loved about the Justice Department and the FBI, is we're not involved in politics and the notion that because of the choices we had to make, we had an impact, leaves me feeling ill.

Now, it may sound odd to say but that wouldn't change the way I thought about the decisions. It just makes it more painful.

You've still got to do the right thing and choose, again, as I thought about it, as between bad and catastrophic, you have got to choose bad every day over catastrophic.

LEIGH SALES: A lot of Democrats are angry at you because they think you cost Hillary Clinton the election, a lot of Republicans are angry at you because of what's going on with Donald Trump. Both sides seem to think you're partisan. So let me ask, did you vote in the 2016 presidential election and if so, who did you vote for?

JAMES COMEY: I did not vote.

LEIGH SALES: Do you believe from what you've seen that President Trump is guilty of any criminal behaviour, either by colluding with Russia or by obstruction of justice in trying to prevent investigations into his campaign's alleged ties to Russia?

JAMES COMEY: I don't know and it's not up to me. I'm a witness, I may be a witness, I suppose, in those examinations and I don't know the answer, because it would turn upon facts that I haven't gathered and can't see from where I sit.

LEIGH SALES: Have you been questioned by the Mueller inquiry already?

JAMES COMEY: I can't comment on that.

LEIGH SALES: FBI agents have raided the offices of Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in recent days. How do you read the significance of that?

JAMES COMEY: I don't know enough to give you an intelligent comment.

What I can say is what I think the American media understands and I hope our Australian colleagues understand, is that the search of a lawyer's office is something that is reviewed very, very carefully in the FBI and the Justice Department. It can't be done casually.

LEIGH SALES: Why is that?

JAMES COMEY: Because of the sensitivities around lawyers and an important privilege, confidential privilege that lawyers enjoy with their clients and so you want to make sure that it's not done casually, that it's done very carefully and then the material that you seize is reviewed in such a way that you're trying to protect attorney-client privilege.

So I don't know the facts of that particular situation but that's the general approach.

LEIGH SALES: The Australian legal system is different to yours. What exactly is at stake in the Mueller inquiry? Could it result in the downfall of the Trump administration?

JAMES COMEY: I don't know. It's an interesting legal question as to whether if the special prosecutor develops evidence sufficient to charge the President with a crime, whether the President of the United States, under our legal system, can be charged with a crime.

I think the current view of the Justice Department, and has been for some time, that you can't criminally charge a President and so we in our Constitution have a process for referring criminal misconduct to our Congress for what we call, I don't know whether you have a term in Australia like this, impeachment proceedings.

LEIGH SALES: Is there a mechanism by which Donald Trump could orchestrate the sacking of Robert Mueller and what would happen if he did?

JAMES COMEY: I think there is a way the President can fire anybody in the executive branch.

It may be a complicated way to accomplish it but a President wanting to do it could accomplish it.

I actually think the practical effect would be almost nil because knowing what I know about the Justice Department and the FBI, you'd actually have to fire everybody in those organisations to stop an investigation, because somebody will pick it up and then if that person's fired, the next person will pick it up and so on until the buildings are vacant, it wouldn't stop.

And so I think it would be bad for a lot of reasons to fire the special prosecutor here. It would be an attack on the rule of law but it would actually be dumb because it wouldn't accomplish the goal of stopping the investigation.

LEIGH SALES: Given the various people close to Donald Trump, who have been drawn into the Mueller inquiry, given the raid now on Cohen's office, is it a reasonable assumption to make that Donald Trump himself would now be under investigation?

JAMES COMEY: I think so and, again, I only know this from the media, but I think the White House itself put out that the President had been told that he was a subject of Robert Mueller's investigation which means he's under investigation.

I don't have any personal knowledge of that but I've seen that said.

LEIGH SALES: Australia's one of the United States' closest allies and Australian citizens are regularly told by their political leaders and also when senior American officials come to visit, say Senator John McCain came through, we're told that we should feel confident to rely on the alliance with the United States because it's bigger than any one person, it's bigger than Donald Trump and that there is a history and a structure and a scaffolding around it if you like.

In your judgement, can Australia continue to view the US as a reliable, trustworthy and credible partner while Donald Trump is President?

JAMES COMEY: Yes and just because I know the extent and culture of the relationship between the two countries, I know it through the national security lens and law enforcement lens.

It would be hard to screw up the relationship between the US and Australia and no one President has enough time to screw it up, because it's so longstanding and so beneficial to both sides.

LEIGH SALES: We are at an historic moment with this presidency and possibly a turning point in the United States or even in global affairs. As FBI director you were a significant figure during this period of time.

How do you think history will remember you and is it how you would like history to remember you?

JAMES COMEY: You know, this is going to sound like a flip answer, I've don't really care much because that kind of thing - I know people pursue reputations and fame and all that.

That's an empty pursuit. I hope I'll be remembered as a good father, a good husband, maybe I'll get to be a good grandfather too and a person who did some good for the people who needed it.

The rest is, I'll be dead and gone. It really doesn't matter.

I know my children love me. I've read the audio book so they're stuck with my voice and my grandchildren will hear my voice.

I'm a happy person and I hate that I was involved in a lot of this stuff. I'm not loving what I'm doing now because I don't love people yelling my name out on the street.

It's hard for me to hide but I'm at peace and regret that I was involved.

As I said, I, the FBI did not want to be involved in the 2016 election but what are you going to do?

LEIGH SALES: Mr Comey, very much appreciate your time.

JAMES COMEY: Yeah.

LEIGH SALES: Thanks for speaking to us.

JAMES COMEY: Thanks for taking the time.