Obama to Pick Former Bush Official to Lead F.B.I.

[OKNancy]

4. Does this help? Maybe read up before the knees start to jerk too hard

In December 2003, as Deputy Attorney General, Comey appointed the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, close friend and former colleague Patrick Fitzgerald, as Special Counsel to head the CIA leak grand jury investigation after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself.

and this:

In early January 2006, The New York Times, as part of their investigation into alleged domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to "certify" the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time. The certification was required under existing White House procedures to continue the program.[6]

After Comey's refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and future Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital [4], to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program.[6] According to the 2007 memoir of Jack Goldsmith, who had been head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the time, he went to the hospital to give Ashcroft support to withstand the pressure from the White House.

In May 2007, Comey testified before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Judiciary subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal. His testimony contradicted that of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who said the firings had been due to poor performance on the part of some of the dismissed prosecutors. Comey stressed that the Justice Department had to be perceived as nonpartisan and nonpolitical in order to function.[15]

“ The Department of Justice, in my view, is run by political appointees of the president. The U.S. attorneys are political appointees of the president. But once they take those jobs and run this institution, it's very important in my view for that institution to be another in American life, that -- because my people had to stand up before juries of all stripes, talk to sheriffs of all stripes, judges of all stripes. They had to be seen as the good guys, and not as either this administration or that administration.[15] ”

In 2013, Comey was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_B._Comey