James Comey Quotations

There is no possibility that any consultations with Padilla's counsel will result in agreed terms of attorney access.

We face two overlapping challenges. The first concerns real-time court-ordered interception of what we call 'data in motion,' such as phone calls, e-mail, and live chat sessions. The second challenge concerns court-ordered access to data stored on our devices, such as e-mail, text messages, photos, and videos - or what we call 'data at rest.'

We face cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, global cyber syndicates, and terrorists. They seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas - things of incredible value to all of us. They seek to strike our critical infrastructure and to harm our economy.

The fact of the matter is that the United States faces real threats from criminals, terrorists, spies, and malicious cyber actors.

There are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese, and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.

Some believe that the FBI has these phenomenal capabilities to access any information at any time - that we can get what we want, when we want it, by flipping some sort of switch. It may be true in the movies or on TV. It is simply not the case in real life.

no one is above the law, that no scheme is too complex or too fancy to be beyond the long arm of the law.

Only a crazy person wouldn't fear approaching a car with tinted windows during a late-night car stop, or pounding up a flight of stairs to execute a search warrant, or fast-roping from a helicopter down into hostile fire. Real agents, like real people, feel that fear in the pit of their stomachs.

One of the hardest things I do as FBI Director is call the chiefs and sheriffs in departments around the nation when officers have been killed in the line of duty. I call to express my sorrow and offer the FBI's help.

I come from a law enforcement family. My grandfather, William J. Comey, was a police officer. Pop Comey is one of my heroes. I have a picture of him on my wall in my office at the FBI, reminding me of the legacy I've inherited and that I must honor.

I believe that the Holocaust is the most significant event in human history.

I believe the job of the FBI Director is to be as transparent as possible with the American people because we work for them.

If AOL fails to comply with the agreement, the deal is off and they are in a world of trouble,

What makes the bravery of the men and women of the FBI so special is that they know exactly what they're in for. They spend weeks and weeks in an academy learning just how hard and dangerous this work is. Then they raise their right hands and take an oath and do that work anyway.

The people of the FBI sacrifice much for their country, and I am proud to lead this organization of dedicated agents, analysts, and professional staff.

The people of the FBI are sworn to protect both security and liberty. It isn't a question of conflict. We must care deeply about protecting liberty through due process of law, while also safeguarding the citizens we serve - in every investigation.

Hate crimes impact not just individuals but entire communities. When a family is attacked because of the color of their skin, it's not just the family that feels violated, but every resident of that neighborhood.

Hate crimes are different from other crimes. They strike at the heart of one's identity - they strike at our sense of self, our sense of belonging. The end result is loss - loss of trust, loss of dignity, and in the worst case, loss of life.

He is the perfect man for this job, ... He is an absolutely apolitical career prosecutor. He is a man with extensive experience in national security and intelligence matters.

It could be that they were victims of extraordinarily bad fortune, that they were flying in the air during the time of the 9/11 attacks, had one-way tickets, and were carrying their devices, ... There were a lot of circumstances that warranted the government taking a very, very close look at them.

I was a high school senior and home alone one night with my younger brother. And a guy - gunman - kicked in our front door at our home in New Jersey and held the two of us captive. We escaped. He caught us again. We escaped again. So, a pretty horrific experience.

I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

Law enforcement's biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the 'paddy wagon.' The Irish had tough times, but little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans.

Just as our adversaries and threats continue to evolve, so, too, must the FBI. The key to this evolution lies with our greatest assets: our people and our partnerships. Every FBI professional understands that thwarting the threats facing our nation means constantly striving to be more effective and more efficient.

KSM was unsure what operation they would finally pursue,

Our obligation is to refuse to let bad win, to refuse to let evil hold the field.

Terrorists, in ungoverned spaces, disseminate poisonous propaganda and training materials to attract troubled souls around the world to their cause.

Terrorists and criminals are increasingly adept at exploiting cutting-edge technologies to carry out or to mask their crimes. To counter current and emerging threats, the FBI actively deploys a wide range of technology-based tools, capabilities, and training that enable and enhance intelligence, national security, and law enforcement operations.

My wife Patrice, in addition to being enormously supportive, has taught me a lot about life. She might argue it's because I have so much to learn. One of the most important things I've learned is the art of listening.

Lives are saved when those potential killers are confronted by a police officer, a strong police presence and actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close 'What are you guys doing on this corner at 1 o'clock in the morning' policing. We need to be careful it doesn't drift away from us in the age of viral videos, or there will be profound consequences.

I was born in 1960 into a more violent America than we had in 2014. We haven't been in such a good place for more than 50 years.

We in the FBI have created a malware repository and analysis tool known as the Binary Analysis Characterization and Storage System, or BACSS, which provides near real-time investigative information. BACSS helps us link malware in different jurisdictions and paint a picture of cyber threats worldwide.

We have built as a government something called the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, NCIJTF, where 19 federal agencies sit together and divide up the work. See the threat, see the challenge, divide it up and share information.

We believe the court's opinions are wrong on the facts and the law, and we are reviewing our appellate options.

We never confirm or deny the existence of any investigation.

We know of approximately 30,000 victims -- and the numbers are growing every day -- and of losses that are in the millions and growing every day, ... In short, with a few keystrokes, these men picked the pockets of tens of thousands of Americans, and in the process, took their identity, stole their money and swiped their security.

Those of us in law enforcement must redouble our efforts to resist bias and prejudice. We must better understand the people we serve and protect - by trying to know, deep in our gut, what it feels like to be a law-abiding young black man walking on the street and encountering law enforcement. We must understand how that young man may see us.

We are releasing this information to help people understand why we are doing what we are doing,

The defendants cooked the books by simply keeping them open beyond the end of a fiscal quarter for however long it took to meet the analysts earning estimates,

The defendants are accused of perpetuating a massive accounting fraud that cost public investors hundreds of millions of dollars when it collapsed, then they allegedly tried to cover up their crimes by lying.

We often speak of domestic terrorism and hate crimes in the same breath, and there is a fine line between the two, and certainly overlap in some cases.

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.

Unfortunately, changing forms of Internet communication are quickly outpacing laws and technology designed to allow for the lawful intercept of communication content.

When someone sends you an email, they are knocking on your door. And when you open the attachment, without looking through the peephole to see who it is, you just opened the door and let a stranger into your life, where everything you care about is.

To accomplish its mission, the FBI relies heavily upon its law enforcement and intelligence partners around the nation and around the globe. By combining our resources and our collective expertise, we are able to investigate national security threats that cross both geographical and jurisdictional boundaries.

The private sector is the key player in cyber security. Private sector companies are the primary victims of cyber intrusions. And they also possess the information, the expertise, and the knowledge to address cyber intrusions and cyber crime in general.

Was he dragged into criminal activity to which he was not predisposed, by a government overbearing his will?

was alive and kicking up until August 2004.

As technology advances, so too does terrorists' use of technology to communicate - both to inspire and recruit. The widespread use of technology propagates the persistent terrorist message to attack U.S. interests, whether in the homeland or abroad.

Cybercrime is becoming everything in crime. Again, because people have connected their entire lives to the Internet, that's where those who want to steal money or hurt kids or defraud go. So it's an epidemic for reasons that make sense.

Each FBI employee understands that to defeat the key threats facing our nation, we must constantly strive to be more efficient and more effective. Just as our adversaries continue to evolve, so, too, must the FBI.

Folks who think that organized crime is a thing of the past in New York are kidding themselves,

federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, your investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses.

FBI joint task forces - Violent Crime Safe Streets, Violent Gang Safe Streets, and Safe Trails Task Forces - focus on identifying and targeting major groups operating as criminal enterprises. Much of the Bureau's criminal intelligence is derived from our state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners, who know their communities inside and out.

ISIL's widespread reach through the Internet and social media is most concerning, as the group has proven dangerously competent at employing such tools for its nefarious strategy. ISIL uses high-quality, traditional media platforms as well as widespread social media campaigns to propagate its extremist ideology.

These charges demonstrate the joint resolve of the Department of Justice and the government of Colombia to dismantle narcotics trafficking organizations in Colombia,

The spine of the FBI is the rule of law. The spine of the FBI is a commitment to doing the right thing, in the right way, while protecting civil liberties.

The threat that ISIL presents and poses to the United States is very different in kind, in type and degree than al Qaeda. ISIL is not your parents' al Qaeda. It's a very different model.

Technology has forever changed the world we live in. We're online, in one way or another, all day long. Our phones and computers have become reflections of our personalities, our interests, and our identities. They hold much that is important to us.

Public corruption is the FBI's top criminal priority. The threat - which involves the corruption of local, state, and federally elected, appointed, or contracted officials - strikes at the heart of government, eroding public confidence and undermining the strength of our democracy.

Privacy is tremendously important. I believe the American people, and all people, should be skeptical of government power, should ask hard questions: What is the authority? What is the oversight? That's the way it ought to be.

Stuff doesn't matter - boats, cars, fancy things don't matter. What matters, what will matter to me, is the love of the people around me, and did I take a chance? Did I seize an opportunity to do something for people with the talents that I was lucky enough to be given? Did I make a difference in the lives of people who needed me?

An element of virtually every national security threat and crime problem the FBI faces is cyber-based or facilitated. We face sophisticated cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, organized cyber syndicates, and terrorists.

As Director of the FBI, I am sworn to ensure that my special agents have what they need to protect themselves and the citizens of this country, and that they are trained to properly use and properly deploy that equipment in the right times and places.

As a communication medium, social media is a critical tool for terror groups to exploit.

As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives - including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies - will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.

a very long-standing interest and success in investigating and prosecuting Russian organized crime, which since the breakup of the Soviet Union is called Eurasian organized crime, and in particular in this defendant.

This indictment marks an important milestone in the life of the president's Corporate Fraud Task Force,

Although individual states have primary responsibility for conducting fair and impartial elections, the FBI becomes involved when paramount federal interests are affected or electoral abuse occurs.

There's a provision that allows counterterrorism investigations to get a court order to obtain documents from car rental places or hotels, or in theory, I suppose, libraries, although I can't figure out how libraries got mixed in this,

For me, law school was a time of joy and hope. Joy in learning my way around the law - learning how to orbit a problem and to ask myself hard questions and to be asked hard questions. Hope that I could be of some use, to be part of the greater good - to make the world a little bit better.

The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 remind us that the terrorist threat against the United States remains persistent. The threat from homegrown violent extremists is of particular concern. These individuals present unique challenges because they do not share a typical profile; their experiences and motives are often distinct and personal.

The benefits of our increasingly digital lives have been accompanied by new dangers, and we have been forced to consider how criminals and terrorists might use advances in technology to their advantage.

The attorney general called and asked me if I was willing to be interviewed for FBI director. And the truth is I told him I didn't think so, that I thought it was too much for my family. But that I would sleep on it and call him back in the morning. And so I went to bed that night convinced I was going to call him back and say no.

I view this as sort of a model,

Social media has allowed groups, such as ISIL, to use the Internet to spot and assess potential recruits. With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States - spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize - either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack.

That's a power that regular criminal investigators have had for hundreds of years. It now applies to counterterrorism investigators. They have to go to a judge and get a court order to obtain the records.

The FBI is engaged in a myriad of efforts to combat cyber threats, from efforts focused on threat identification and sharing inside and outside of government, to our internal emphasis on developing and retaining new talent and changing the way we operate to evolve with the cyber threat.

The FBI has built up substantial expertise to address cyber threats, both in the homeland and overseas. Here at home, the FBI serves as the executive agent for the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF), which joins together 19 intelligence, law enforcement, and military agencies to coordinate cyber threat investigations.

The FBI continues to work with tribes through the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 to help tribal governments better address the unique public safety challenges and disproportionately high rates of violence and victimization in many tribal communities.

In 1983, my second year of law school, I became the only white player in the Ogden Park Basketball League at 65th and Racine. My teammates joked that I integrated the league, which I guess is true. They weren't so much focused on integration as on winning, and they knew you can't teach height. 'He can't jump, but he sure is tall.'

Cisco projects that in 2020, now just five years away, there will be seven billion people on the earth and 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. Six-and-a-half devices on average per person. As a father of five young adults and teenagers, I think we are - in my household, we've exceeded the 6.5 number.

I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power. You cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that. That's why they divided power among three branches, to set interest against interest.

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

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.

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.

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.

Although we did not find clear evidence that Hillary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they 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.

The lawyers doing the sorting for Hillary 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.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Hillary 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.

We did not find direct evidence that Secretary Hillary 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.

The charges filed today reflect our commitment to pursue fraud cases both up and down the corporate ladder,