Survey: Comey's support at FBI had slipped but was still strong

Updated



An annual employee survey released by the FBI Wednesday showed Director James Comey had earned high marks for his leadership but that he had also seen declines in the approval of his job performance from across the agency.

Comey, who was fired four years into his 10-year term, notched four out of five points in all but three of some 72 topic areas, including strong endorsements that he's "able to see things from different perspectives," "maintains a calm demeanor in stressful situations," "makes the hard decisions" and "understands the big picture."

While Comey remained well above the threshold for success on the survey, in every one of the topic areas measured since 2015, the director saw his scores decline during his tenure, including a 7 percent drop from 2015 in whether he "represents the FBI well," and a 16 percent drop over the same period in whether he "acknowledges when he or she has made a mistake."

The most recent survey on Comey's job performance polled 48 people who reported to the former director.


In a separate survey of FBI employees, morale also earned high scores across the board.

The survey comes after President Donald Trump asserted in May that "the FBI has been in turmoil," telling NBC's Lester Holt, "You know that, I know that, everybody knows that."

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at a press conference, insisted that "the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director."

Comey strongly pushed back on those statements, telling the Senate intelligence committee a month after his firing that the Trump administration "chose to defame me, and, more importantly, the FBI, by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader."

"Those were lies, plain and simple," he said.

Copyright 2017 U.S. News & World Report

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