Top 156 Quotes & Sayings by James Comey - Page 3

I think that citizens should be skeptical of government power. But I fear it's bled over to cynicism. It is something that is getting in the way of reasoned discussion, and I'm very concerned about how to change that trend of cynicism.

I'm a big fan of the rule of law.

The Clinton investigation was a completed investigation that the FBI had been deeply involved in, so I had an opportunity to understand all the facts and apply those facts against the law as I understood them. This investigation was under way - still going when I was fired. So it's nowhere near in the same place.

I shouldn't talk about individuals in an open forum, at least without thinking about it better.

We did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence.

Our process inside the United States government has gotten much better at making sure we touch all possible source of information about a refugee. The interview process has gotten more robust, so we've gotten our act together in that respect. The challenge remains, especially with respect to folks coming from Syria, we're unlikely to have anything in our holdings. That is, with people coming from Iraq, the United States government was there for a very long period of time. We had biometrics, we had source information. We're unlikely to have that kind of picture about someone coming from Syria.

We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Hillary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.

I don't know enough about the legislation , but I think the more information you can put in the hands of the people who are vetting, people who are going to be near children, the better.

If conduct is intentional, it could subject some of the criminal liability.

Our need for public safety and our need for privacy are crashing into each other and we've got to sort that out.

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014.

In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn't do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That's what people do. And that should truly frighten us.

Half of the devices that we encounter in terrorism cases, in counterintelligence cases, in gang cases, in child pornography cases, cannot be opened with any technique. That is a big problem. And so the shadow continues to fall.

Secretary Hillary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department. She also used numerous mobile devices to send and to read email on that personal domain.

There is evidence that Democrates were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.

I care a lot about privacy. I also care an awful lot about public safety. There continues to be a huge collision between those two things we care about.

There are two things that matter in a criminal investigation of a subject.What did the person do, and when they did that thing, what were they thinking? When you look at the hundred-years-plus of the Justice Department investigation and prosecution of mishandling of classified information, those two questions are obviously present.

We all love privacy. We all care about public safety. And none of - at least people that I hang around with, none of us want back doors. We don't want access to devices built-in in some way.

We have no basis to conclude she [Hillary Clinton] lied to the FBI.

Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked 'classified' in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

I'm in the business where I can't ever say there's no risk associated with someone.

She [Hillary Clinton] used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014... I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.

It is a little bit difficult to talk about things that do involve classified matters in public. But I think the public needs to know that there are multiple oversight layers, including the FISA Court, congressional oversight, internal oversight within the FBI and intelligence community, that protects Americans from - under - their - their privacy rights while targeting terrorists and people who are trying to kill us.

Sometimes the FBI is assigned to do background checks on people who are coming into government in the executive office of the president. Other times, not. A lot of times there are people who are arriving with clearances that already exist.

WikiLeaks is a important focus of our attention.

What we do is we combine information collected from any lawful source in a single FBI database so we don't miss a dot when we're conducting investigations in the United States. What we make sure of, though, is nobody gets to see FISA information of any kind unless they've had the appropriate training and have the appropriate oversight.

The more able we are to keep guns out the hand so criminals and spouse abusers all - the better. So the more information we have the better for law enforcement perspective.

What we want to work with manufacturers on is to figure out how can we accommodate both interests in a sensible way? How can we optimize the privacy, security features of their devices and allow court orders to be complied with?

Really bad people around the world, because of the genius of American innovation, use our products and infrastructure for their emails, for their communications.

In my view, a huge portion of WikiLeaks's activities has nothing to do with legitimate newsgathering, informing the public, commenting on important public controversies, but is simply about releasing classified information to damage the United States of America.

In our counterterrorism cases and our counterintelligence cases, we can issue all kinds of - of layers of approval in the FBI, a national security letter to find out the subscriber to a particular telephone number and to find out what numbers that telephone number was in contact with. Not the content of those communications, but just the connection.

The Obama administration was not in a position where they were seeking legislation. I don't know yet how President Trump intends to approach this. I know he spoke about it during the campaign. I know he cares about it, but it's premature for me to say.

Our focus is and should be on the leakers, not those that are obtaining it as part of legitimate newsgathering.

We're conducting an investigation to understand whether there was any coordination between the Russian efforts and anybody associated with the Trump campaign.