"Describe Robert Mueller in one word."

James Comey dropped his head to consider the question from the audience, then quickly looked up.

"Atticus," he said.

The packed house at Portland's Revolution Hall on Saturday gasped at the former FBI director's comparison of the special counsel to Atticus Finch, the morally upright father and lawyer in Harper Lee's classic novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- and then burst into applause.

Mueller is charged with investigating the alleged "collusion" between President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and Russian government operatives who sought to undermine America's democracy. Mueller's appointment as special counsel grew directly out of Trump's firing of Comey in May 2017, an action that the president's former White House strategist, Steve Bannon, has called the biggest mistake "maybe in modern political history."

Comey, who came to Portland on Saturday to talk about his new book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership," insisted that if Mueller is allowed to complete his work "he will find the facts." (Washington, D.C., and the national media have been awash in rumors about the president being intent on ousting the special counsel.)

"I don't know where the facts will take us," Comey added. "I don't think we should be rooting for a certain result. ... I'm rooting for the facts to be found."

Inside Revolution Hall before James Comey took the stage.

More important, he's rooting for the facts -- whatever they turn out to be -- to matter. "There are things that are true and there are things that are false," he said. If we lose sight of the importance of truth and truthfulness, he insisted, we are lost as a nation.

Comey hastened to point out that his book, part memoir and part meditation on the value of personal ethics, isn't about President Trump.

He said that only three of the 14 chapters in the book are related to Trump. The other chapters track, among other things, his pursuit of New York mobsters when he was a young prosecutor in the 1980s and '90s, and his interactions with President Barack Obama, who appointed him as FBI director in 2013.

As for the three chapters about Trump: "They're depressing," he admitted.

Comey said he sensed the president is driven by deep insecurity -- and unfettered ego. "Moral, ethical leaders have external reference points to make decisions, a set of values," he said. "Trump has only one reference point, and it's internal. It's, 'What's best for me?' It's amoral."

The former FBI director declared that his criticism of Trump isn't about partisanship, pointing out that when he was in the private sector, he gave money to the 2008 and 2012 Republican presidential nominees.

It's about character.

"Trump's not morally fit," he said. "He lies about all matters big and small. That is not a political statement. And [that lying] should matter to all of us, no matter what your political stripe is."

Lately, Comey has been on the receiving end of vitriol from the president and the president's supporters. (Trump has called him a "slimeball" and said he should be in jail.) And the former FBI chief seems to be at peace with that. After all, he faced anger from Democrats before it came from Republicans. Democratic partisans have argued that the way he handled the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices is the reason she lost the 2016 presidential election.

In the end, Comey insists that ethical leadership, not whether the country is led by Republicans or Democrats, is what's important. He highlighted this theme again and again at the Revolution Hall event. He also highlighted it at the very beginning of "A Higher Loyalty," with an epigraph by the late ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, a personal hero of his.

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible," Niebuhr wrote, "but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

-- Douglas Perry