The former F.B.I. director’s detractors have debated his actions and decisions on normative grounds. But there has been little focus on James Comey’s moral and intellectual leanings. PHOTOGRAPH BY MELISSA GOLDEN / REDUX

More than three decades before the F.B.I. began investigating whether members of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign had colluded with the Russian government, James Comey—the Bureau’s recently fired director—envisioned a Russian conquest of America. He was then a senior at the College of William & Mary, in Virginia, with a column in the school paper, the Flat Hat. His commentaries satirized everything from crooked politicians to classmates who fretted about life after graduation.

On December 4, 1981, he parodied Cold War appeasers. “One must pause and reflect upon nuclear holocaust,” he wrote. “I doubt many students have taken the time to consider the ramifications of nuclear conflict.” The school’s gym would surely close, he warned; intramural basketball would cease, and a campus film series would end. “The stakes are too high: It’s time we folded. We should unilaterally disarm.” President Ronald Reagan, Comey wrote, should send the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, a note “offering unconditional surrender.”

Liberals, he implied, would be pleased with a Soviet occupation: “The National Rifle Association would be flushed, crime would decrease, the Pentagon would be a shopping mall, Jerry Falwell would be sadistically tortured.”

Comey is now fifty-six. On Thursday, he is scheduled to testify before the Senate about Russian interference in the 2016 election. He will also likely be asked about the several personal interactions that he had with Donald Trump before May 9th, when Trump fired him. Trump’s view of Comey has oscillated wildly over the past year. In July, he disparaged the F.B.I.’s “phony investigation” of Hillary Clinton after it failed to lead to an indictment. In October, Trump praised Comey’s “guts” for reopening the case. This spring, the President became angry, in part, because in a series of awkward encounters Comey refused to pledge loyalty to him.

On February 14th, Trump cornered Comey after a terrorism-related briefing in the Oval Office. Trump’s national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, had resigned the previous day, and Trump urged Comey to drop the case against Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting Flynn go,” Trump said, according to remarks Comey prepared ahead of tomorrow’s hearing. Comey did not drop the case. Indeed, because Trump kept meeting with him and discussing the Russia investigation, Comey had become not just a representative for the Bureau but also a kind of witness. Following a meeting at Trump Tower in January, Comey said that he went outside and immediately recorded their conversation on a laptop in an F.B.I. vehicle, adding, “Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward.”

Comey has told associates that he never tried to lure Trump into improprieties. “It wasn’t like Jim was going to the Mob boss, all wired up, trying to secretly extract a confession,” one associate told me. Yet, in Comey’s view, Trump’s behavior toward him repeatedly crossed the line, making him “an obstructor.” Based on Comey’s prepared remarks, his Senate testimony will lay the basis for this legal claim, without explicitly making the charge.

His testimony is likely to be supremely assured. A senior intelligence official said of Comey, “He likes the stage. He takes politicians’ questions apart. He loves the fact that he’s smarter than them.”

In October, 2003, Comey was asked, at his confirmation hearing to become the Deputy Attorney General, how he might handle a politically charged case implicating an Attorney General who refused to recuse himself. “I don’t care about politics,” he insisted. “I care about doing the right thing.” In a profile published that December in New York, Comey further smudged the lines of his political identity. He said that in his twenties he had been both a Communist and a Reaganite. “I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically,” he went on. “Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

Over the past year, Comey’s detractors have debated his actions and decisions on normative grounds. Was it proper for him to hold a press conference to announce the F.B.I.’s findings on the Hillary Clinton e-mail case? Should he have sent a letter to Congress, days before the election, notifying them that he was reopening the investigation? Why didn’t he inform voters before November 8th that Trump’s campaign was under investigation for possible collusion with a foreign adversary? Meanwhile, there has been little focus on Comey’s moral and intellectual leanings.

Despite Comey’s protestations that he has no interest in politics, he has signalled some abiding concerns over the years. His college thesis, “The Christian in Politics,” is about power and integrity, and is anchored in a comparison of the political philosophies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Jerry Falwell. Comey concluded that Falwell was a huckster who was inclined to “violate the constitutional separation of Church and State as well as the tax-exempt status of his church.” He was repelled by what he saw as Falwell’s false projection of virtue. Comey considered Niebuhr, however, to be an intellectual giant, one of “the world’s greatest moral and political theologians.” He concurred with Niebuhr that Christians were “essential to the political order,” and that a life led in emulation of Jesus was one “guided by the impossible norm of love,” and that such an existence placed “political institutions under greater possibilities.”

At the same time, Comey noted, Niebuhr recognized that it could be dangerous for a politician to see himself as a moral beacon. “The pretensions of virtue are as offensive to God as the pretensions of power,” Niebuhr said. Earlier this year, Comey, speaking at the University of Texas, echoed Niebuhr’s warning, saying, “John Adams once said to Thomas Jefferson, in one of the great letter exchanges, ‘Power always thinks it has a great soul.’ There’s great danger that I will fall in love with my own virtue.”

Upon graduating, Comey continued to voice political opinions. In May, 1982, the _Times _published a letter in which Comey criticized an editorial for its “condemnation of Right-to-Lifers” and for its suggestion that the federal government should “pay for abortion through Medicaid.” Comey avoided expressing his personal views on abortion, but he emphasized that Roe v. Wade, in upholding bans on late-term abortions, “explicitly stated that government has an interest in abortion and is therefore justified in exercising authority over the actions of pregnant women.” Comey went on: