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Former FBI Director James Comey, here in 2017, says he was "sickened" by last week's attack on the Capitol. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

Former FBI Director James Comey, here in 2017, says he was "sickened" by last week's attack on the Capitol.

Former FBI Director James Comey's new memoir has the misfortune of rendering a verdict on the Trump presidency before what could be its most defining day.

Comey's book was already finished before the violent mob incited by the president stormed the Capitol last week, leading to five deaths.

"I was sickened, as I hope all Americans were, watching an attack on the center of our democracy," Comey says of the violence. "And I was also angry as someone who spent a lot of a career in law enforcement; I was angry that it was being allowed to happen and that the Capitol was not being adequately defended. It just mystified me and angered me."

The federal prosecutor in Washington left open the possibility of charging Trump over crimes related to the riot. Washington, D.C.'s attorney general said the same. Some Democrats have also called for prosecuting Trump over other potential crimes.

Comey tells NPR he thinks Trump should be impeached but opposes a drawn-out federal criminal trial. "I think it's still the best thing for the country not to have Donald Trump on our television screens every day for the next three or four years," he says.

Comey's 2018 book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, describes Trump as "unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values." His latest offering, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency and Trust, continues to lay out his case against the Trump administration while assessing former Attorney General William Barr and the Mueller report. Trump's firing of Comey in 2017 helped set in motion what became Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comey talked with NPR's Ailsa Chang about the attack on the Capitol, the response of law enforcement, his actions involving Hillary Clinton's email in 2016 and trying to convince people to believe the truth.

There were warnings that something on that scale was going to happen at the U.S. Capitol. How concerned are you that law enforcement, potentially, even including the FBI, just were not ready for what happened?

That was the source of my anger as I watched it, because we were faulted as a government after 9/11 by the 9/11 Commission for a failure of imagination, not imagining how the terrorists might attack us. This required no imagination at all. This was just a failure.

Because they were announcing they were coming. They were literally walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue. I don't know how the Capitol was not fortified in an adequate way. And I think it'll be really important for all of us to find that out with a commission-type examination.

You do make the case at the end of your book that the Justice Department should not spend its time trying to prosecute Donald Trump after he leaves office for the sake of rebuilding national unity and moving on. Do you still believe that, given last week's events, that Donald Trump should not be prosecuted?

That was a very close call when I wrote about it and finished the book back in the fall. It's even closer now, but I think it's still the best thing for the country not to have Donald Trump on our television screens every day for the next three or four years as part of United States v. Trump in the District of Columbia.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to try to heal a country both spiritually and literally, because so many of our fellow citizens are sick and dying. And I just think Donald Trump's craving for attention is something we don't want to accommodate now. We don't want him center of our lives. I'd rather him in his bathrobe yelling at cars on the lawn at Mar-a-Lago with the camera lights off. I think that's the best thing for the country now. But look, I'm not sure that I'm right.

Do you think he should at least be investigated for his role in what happened at the U.S. Capitol?

I think the Congress has important interests to vindicate. I think he ought to be impeached. And ideally, he would be convicted by the Senate and barred from further office. I also think that the local prosecutors in New York should continue their work to hold him accountable for his life of being a garden-variety criminal before he became president. I'm just talking about not giving him the platform of a daily drama outside the federal courthouse in Washington, while Joe Biden is trying to change this country in a good way.

You mentioned the impeachment process, but impeachment is a political process, right? And you write in your book that for people to trust in the legal system, everyone needs to be held accountable under the law. So how does the country move on when you don't hold the president of the United States accountable under the law and you rely on a political process, assuming that states don't end up prosecuting?

That's what makes it such a close question. But I think slightly differently about the impeachment process. It's a deeply legal process embedded in our Constitution, and it's about the American people, through their representatives, holding accountable the chief executive. And so I don't think of that if there were no federal prosecution as not holding him accountable. I think it's actually the most important form of accountability right now.

Throughout the book, you talk about this reservoir of trust that's necessary for the Justice Department to function. In what way do you believe former Attorney General Bill Barr eroded this trust you speak of when the Mueller report was released?

By lying to the American people about it in both written and in a brief press conference, misleading the American people so severely that later a federal judge wouldn't trust the Department of Justice's redactions or elimination of some texts from that in deciding what to make public. But that misleading the American people allowed the Trump administration and their enablers to proclaim full vindication, complete vindication, this thing is over. When anyone who took the time to read the report knew that that was false.

You argue that Mueller left himself wide open to having his findings distorted by Bill Barr and others. You say that was Mueller's fault. Can you just briefly explain that point?

I think the world of Bob Mueller and I have worked with him and considered him a friend for a long time, but I think the way he handled the conclusion of his investigation allowed it to be distorted, lied about by the president and the attorney general. And the reason I say that is: Bob did the old-school thing. He prepared a very long report in single-spaced, 12 Times New Roman with, I think, thousands of footnotes and sent that over as his report. Well, that's not how Americans consume information. I don't know that they ever did, but they certainly don't today. And that allowed the attorney general to go to the keyboard and write pithy letters and offer snapshots in a statement at a press conference to the American people, which drove the entire narrative.

You announced in a letter to Congress just days before the 2016 presidential election that you were restarting the Hillary Clinton email investigation because of a new batch of emails that was discovered. Do you think that you also left room for people to distort what you were, in fact, saying in that letter?

Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, it's a different kind of situation, but it's the same basic challenge. How do you provide information that fosters the trust and the knowledge of the people that you're working for, the American people? The challenge there in late October was there was nothing we could say beyond that sparse letter that wouldn't magnify the harm that was flowing from our doing the notice in the first place. If I had included in there that we found hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop, I think I would have increased the harm. And so we wrestled with it. But there was no way to do less harm by speaking more at that point.

I want to turn you now to the ultimate question that you pose in your book, and that is, how do you restore faith in the Justice Department given all that's happened the last four years? How optimistic are you that restoring that trust is possible?

I'm very optimistic. It will take time. The easiest part's going to be restoring the morale and the operations of the Department of Justice because the culture is solid. The hard part is going to be reaching those Americans, the tens of millions, literally, who are trapped in a fog of lies about the virus, about our institutions, including about the FBI and the Justice Department. It'll take time to win that back, to coax those people back to reality. But it'll happen. The work will prove itself.

And the pick of Judge [Merrick] Garland, who I don't know, seems to be the perfect person, as Ed Levi was when he became attorney general after Watergate, to restore not just the internal operations of the department, but the way in which the American people see it as something nonpartisan, something above the tribal scrum in our country.

You continually argue in this book that truth is paramount, but how do you make the truth matter when it appears a lot of America does not agree on what the truth is?

It's very hard. It requires constant attention. And you don't bring people out of a fog of lies by shouting at them that their facts are wrong.

And so the way you do it is you show them what good looks like. And I'm optimistic that our new president is going to show what empathetic, competent leadership when we need it most looks like, and then people gradually awaken.

I'm actually hoping that this horrific attack on the Capitol is an inflection point in that sense, that if the numbers are to be believed, people are awakening more quickly even than I expected to what's really going on here. But it will take time. It'll be earned by the work and by transparency and communication with the American people.

Sam Gringlas and Courtney Dorning produced and edited the audio interview. James Doubek produced for the Web.

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James Comey On The Capitol Riots, Truth And Trump - NPR

Former Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway defended her presidents legacy on Friday night, telling HBO Real Time host Bill Maher: You cant deny that many people are better off.

Well theyre not better off now, Maher replied. A lot of them are dead.

Johns Hopkins University put the US death toll from the coronavirus at 391,789 on Saturday, with 3,258 deaths on Friday and a caseload of 23.5m.

Also on Friday, Joe Biden labelled the Trump administrations vaccine rollout a dismal failure.

Conway insisted the real disappointment for people like me is that the last two months, lets just say from 6 November to 6 January, werent spent mostly talking about the accomplishments, reviewing the accomplishments. He built the greatest economy we had.

Maher responded that the US economy was pretty much built when Trump succeeded Barack Obama. He did not mention the catastrophic economic impact of Covid and the botched response. The US unemployment rate is 6.7%, with new claims rocketing.

Conways reference to 6 January was telling. That was the day Trump told supporters at the White House to fight like hell to overturn his election defeat, which he has not conceded and which he baselessly maintains was the result of electoral fraud.

A mob stormed the US Capitol, resulting in five deaths one a police officer who confronted attackers, one a rioter shot by law enforcement multiple arrests, fears of more attacks and reports saying some who ransacked the seat of federal government intended to capture lawmakers and kill them.

Trump eventually said he disavowed the violence but was nonetheless impeached in the House of Representatives for inciting the attack. He is set to vacate the White House on Wednesday, when Biden will be inaugurated, but will still face a Senate trial. Mike Lindell, chief executive of My Pillow and an informal Trump adviser, was seen at the White House on Friday carrying notes which appeared to advocate the imposition of martial law.

Conway is a longtime Republican operative whose CV now includes five years as counsellor to the only president impeached twice, a dogged defender who found infamy claiming Trump peddled alternative facts and for blaming refugees for a terror attack, the Bowling Green massacre, that never occurred.

She left the White House in August, saying she wanted to spend more time with a family split by Trump her husband is the lawyer George Conway, a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, while her daughter Claudia has made a name for herself with criticism of the president on social media. Conway campaigned for Trump in November and for the Republican candidates in two Senate runoffs in Georgia in January contests Democrats won, thereby taking control of the chamber.

Conway told Maher the Capitol riot was horrible, inexcusable, disgraceful and said justice should be served. She added: Last week was vulgar. Theres no place for violence and vandalism. I wish the president had spoken with the people earlier to get them the hell out of there.

I did get through to him. Id said to the person standing next to them, Please add my name to the chorus of people just saying, You have to tell them to get out. I dont know what theyre doing, why theyre there, but tell them to get out.

Maher asked if Conway would admit that the reason why they were there is because he never conceded the election. She told Maher she recognised Trumps defeat a long time ago. In fact, she did so on 4 December, a month after election day and long after the race was called for Biden.

I think those murders and marauders insult, not represent, the Trump movement, Conway insisted, adding that Trump represented the forgotten man and woman and saying: 74 million people is not a base its a large percentage of the country.

More than 81 million voted for Biden, who also won the electoral college by 306-232, a result Trump said was a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton.

Maher pressed Conway on Trumps lying and insults, reading out both a list of barbs Trump has thrown at him and a list of things kindergarteners know not to do lie, bully, boast, mock the handicapped which Trump did from his position of power.

Conway dodged such volleys with practiced ease, saying she was proud to have been a woman with a voice in White House policy debates.

Conway and Maher have history, back to his days presenting Politically Incorrect for ABC. Writing in the Daily Beast on Friday, Marlow Stern said the comedian could have done a better job of holding her feet to the fire.

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Kellyanne Conway tells Bill Maher Americans 'better off' thanks to Trump - The Guardian

Former FBI boss James Comey has told Sky News he is worried about the threat of violence from "armed, disturbed people" at Joe Biden's inauguration.

Mr Comey, who was controversially fired by Donald Trump in 2017, says the threat has "to be taken very, very seriously" following the deadly Capitol riots.

The new US president will be sworn in on Wednesday amid high security after the FBI identified more than 200 people threatening violence in "concerning online chatter".

Fuelled by unsubstantiated claims by Mr Trump, many of his supporters believe there was fraud in November's election.

"I'm worried because there are armed, disturbed people who are in this state of mind where they believe their country is being taken from them," said Mr Comey.

"So it's a threat law enforcement in the States has to take very seriously.

"At the same time, I know that we have the capability, investigative and the tactical capability on scene, to protect these locations and so I am optimistic that the threat will be neutralised, but it has to be taken very, very seriously."

On Friday a man was arrested in Washington DC when a gun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition was found in his vehicle after he allegedly showed police an unauthorised inauguration credential.

Wesley Allen Beeler, from Virginia, has been charged with carrying a concealed weapon, possessing an unregistered firearm, unlawful possession of ammunition and possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device, police told NBC News in Washington.

The National Guard has been descending on Washington to guard government buildings ahead of inauguration day, when officials say 21,000 will be on hand.

The storming of the Capitol building - the heart of US democracy - on 6 January caused widespread shock in America and across the world, with Trump supporters running amok and leaving five people dead.

Police were hugely outnumbered and have been criticised over how easy it was for the rioters to seize control.

Mr Comey told Sky News he was "sickened" by the violence and angry at the failure to defend the building, despite the obvious threat.

"I was angered by the apparent failure to defend a hill, it [the Capitol] sits on a hill with 2,000 officers assigned to it on a daily basis, the failure to defend the hill. It just mystifies and angers me," he said.

"It is going to be important for our country to understand that failure."

He added: "9/11 we were told was a failure of imagination, we didn't anticipate the way the terrorists might come at us; this didn't require imagination.

"This was all over the internet and the group literally walked slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol so it was just a failure and we need to know why at all levels so that we don't let it happen again."

Mr Comey is a fierce critic of Mr Trump - who he has previously compared to a mafia boss.

He was fired by the president in May 2017 while the FBI was investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

White House officials accused him of mishandling the investigation into the email practices of Hillary Clinton, but Mr Trump later confirmed the "Russia thing" was on his mind when he made the decision.

Mr Comey, 60, has just released a new book called Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust, described as a "clarion call for a return to fairness and equity in the law".

The disgust among many Americans over the Capitol riots this week led Mr Trump to become the first president to be impeached twice after the House of Representatives charged him with inciting the riot.

No date has been set for the political trial that follows, where senators can also vote by a simple majority to block Mr Trump from ever standing for election again.

You can watch the full interview on Sophy Ridge on Sunday from 8.30am.

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Biden inauguration: Former FBI boss James Comey warns of serious threat from 'armed, disturbed people' - Sky News

Trump supporters stand on the U.S. Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, as the Congress works to certify the electoral college votes.

Bill Clark | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

Corporate money has flooded U.S. elections ever since 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that business donations amounted to protected free speech under the First Amendment.

But the steady stream of cash slowed this week, when several businesses announced they would suspend donations from their political action committees after the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6. The businesses spanned industries, from Facebook to JPMorgan Chase to Walmart.

The promises were relatively narrow and did not suggest a permanent retreat from election spending. Some businesses promised only to cut spending from politicians who objected to confirming President-elect Joe Biden's victory, while others said they would reassess all PAC contributions.

But as employees, consumers and shareholders step up pressure on businesses to address their social impact, the announcements represented a significant departure from the status quo.

If the trend sticks, businesses may look to a handful of companies to learn how to gain influence in government without PAC spending.

In the tech sector, Apple and IBM have long resisted creating their own PACs, yet their presence is felt strongly in Washington. CEOs from both companies have sat on President Donald Trump's American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, and Apple's Tim Cook has cultivated a relationship with Trump that may have helped it avoid getting caught in the crossfire of Trump's tariff fight with China.

"We've never had a PAC at IBM and I've never felt that it diminished our effectiveness or our voice in any way," Christopher Padilla, IBM's VP of government and regulatory affairs, told CNBC in an interview. "In fact, it's times like this that I'm actually glad we don't have a PAC because it's kind of easy just to say, 'I'm going to stop my PAC giving either to everybody or to some people.' It's a little harder to say what are the deeper issues that are causing some of these problems and can we do anything about it as companies?"

IBM revealed on Friday several particular areas where it plans to focus its advocacy this year. Broadly, the policies center around ensuring a stable federal government and that political partisanship doesn't interfere with public servants' jobs. This includes things like strengthening the Hatch Act, which is meant to prevent public officials from using their posts for partisan activities, and legislating clear rules about how a presidential transition should be performed.

Padilla talked with CNBC on Thursday to share why IBM has decided to take a stand on such issues and how it has made its voice heard in Washington without PAC contributions.

PACs aren't the only way companies can spend money to influence politicians. In the third quarter of 2020, for example, Apple spent nearly $1.6 million and IBM $650,000 in lobbying spending, according to public disclosures.

Padilla said much of the money IBM puts toward policy issues is used to connect with local representatives. Pre-pandemic, this included flying many of them into Washington to meet directly with lawmakers.

"I sit in those meetings and the kinds of relationships the local plant manager from New York or Texas has with their elected official, you can't buy that with hundreds of PAC checks," Padilla said.

IBM has had a seat at the table for key policy proposals, including around reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a contentious statute that protects online platforms from being held liable for users' messages on their platforms. IBM successfully advocated for SESTA-FOSTA, the package that removed Section 230 protection for platforms that hosted solicitations of sex trafficking.

More recently, it has urged lawmakers go even further, making liability protection dependent on platforms demonstrating a standard of "reasonable care" to remove illegal behavior from their sites. IBM has praised the bipartisan PACT Act, for example, which would require platforms to remove content that a court finds to be illegal within 24 hours. The company is firm, however, that Section 230 should not be repealed and the "Good Samaritan" provision that allows companies to moderate their platforms should be left intact.

Tech platforms like Facebook have also advocated for SESTA-FOSTA as well as other modest reforms to Section 230. But IBM does not have as much potential direct exposure to liability as consumer-facing platforms would if the statute were more significantly altered.

President Donald Trump speaks, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence (L) and IBM CEO Virginia Marie 'Ginni' Rometty (R) during a roundtable discussion on vocational training with United States and German business leaders lead in the Cabinet Room of the White House on March 17, 2017 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images

In some ways, shying away from election spending has been helpful to IBM's efforts, especially during a time of deep political division. Padilla described IBM as "fiercely nonpartisan," even during the intense 2016 election where many prominent tech executives voiced support for then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Padilla said IBM was able to quickly reach out to the Trump administration to lay out areas of overlapping interests.

In addition to serving on Trump's workforce policy panel, former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty previously served on former President Barack Obama's export council.

"I remember going with her in September 2016 for a meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office to talk about trade and we were back in the West Wing less than six months later for her to have a meeting with President Trump," Padilla said.

Without PAC donations or other partisan moves, he said, "When the pendulum inevitably swings, you can be well-positioned to advocate your interests."

Without a PAC, Padilla said it would have been easy to have "washed our hands and said we don't have anything to do here" to address the Capitol riot. But, he said, that approach "certainly wouldn't have addressed the questions we've gotten from our own employees about what can we do to try to address some of these issues."

Employee activism has gained steam over the past few years, particularly at tech companies built on the values of an open internet and innovation. At places like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, internal movements have forced the companies to takes stances or action on issues like climate change, sexual harassment and work with the military.

Over the past summer during mass protests for racial justice and police reform, employees, consumers and shareholders looked to brands to take a stance on those issues. Many companies issued statements, pledged money to nonprofits and some, like IBM, backed policies like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Padilla said he has noticed "a sea change" in terms of how employees, shareholders and local communities expect the company to get involved in issues outside of its direct business during his nearly 12 years at IBM.

"What we're seeing more and more is companies are having to get involved in issues that maybe go a little bit outside their narrow lanes because their employees and their shareholders are expecting them to do so," Padilla said."This is what companies do now."

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How IBM influences policy without spending big money on election campaigns - CNBC

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to name Gary Gensler, a former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to Reuters.

Gensler is a long-time Washington policymaker. He was a top Treasury official during the Clinton administration, and, while leading the CFTC, he helped craft Dodd-Frank, the federal government's response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Gary Gensler

Source: CFTC

"He's a smart and tough regulator who knows how to get things done," Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, told The Wall Street Journal.

Analysts praise Gensler's tenure at the CFTC, the federal government's main derivatives regulator. He was there for five years immediately following the financial crisis.

"He was terrifically effective," Roper said.

Gensler is credited with creating a framework for regulating the over-the-counter swaps market and for going after banks whose manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) ultimately encouraged officials to consider replacing it.

After leaving the CFTC, the former Goldman Sachs banker joined Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign as its CFO. Currently, he's an adjunct instructor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

At the SEC, analysts expect Gensler to roll back many of the outgoing administration's regulatory efforts, including eased rules to encourage more companies to go public and to allow companies to pay gig workers partially in equity stakes.

He's also expected to seek tougher disclosure rules, tighten firewalls between companies and their auditors, and press companies to disclose their environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance.

"In stark contrast to the prior [SEC] chairman, Gary will actually look out for Mr. and Mrs. 401(k) and Main Street investors," Better Markets CEO Dennis Kelleher said in an Axios report. "Gary is the right choice to lead the SEC in a new direction."

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Former Clinton CFO, CFTC head Gary Gensler expected to be named SEC chief - CFO Dive