On September 4, 2013, James Comey was sworn in as the seventh director of the FBI.

A native of Yonkers, New York, Comey attended the College of William and Mary and the University of Chicago Law School. Afterwards, Comey returned to New York and joined the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York as an assistant US attorney. There, he took on numerous crimes, most notably organized crime in the case of the United States v. John Gambino, et al. Comey then became an assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, where he prosecuted the high-profile case that followed the 1996 terrorist attack on the US military's Khobar Towers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

Comey returned to New York after 9/11 to become the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. At the end of 2003, he was tapped to be the deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice (DOJ) under then-U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft and moved to the Washington, D.C. area.

Comey left the DOJ in 2005 to serve as general counsel and senior vice-president at defence contractor Lockheed Martin. Five years later, he joined Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment fund, as its general counsel. In early 2013, Comey became a lecturer in law, a senior research scholar and Hertog Fellow in national security law at Columbia Law School.

After he was fired as FBI Director, Comey held the King Lecture Chair in Public Policy at Howard University for 2017-18 and served as a Distinguished Lecturer in Public Policy at William and Mary for 2018-2019. In September 2020, his first book, A Higher Loyalty, was made into a Showtime limited series, The Comey Rule.