About Those "Memos to the Files": The Good Bureaucrat Comey
The Consul General at my first overseas posting, Melbourne, Australia, pressured me to issue a visa to the gigolo boyfriend of the wife of that fair city's mayor. An "artist," the boyfriend and the Lord Mayor's consort planned to hang out in Manhattan for a year. Time has blurred the details, but the whole thing was tawdry and placed us Americans potentially at the center of local politics, not to mention a messy love triangle and tabloid feast. Our "CG" was old school Foreign Service - a burnished, suave WASPy Ivy Leaguer. He simply wanted Madame Mayor out of his hair and not pose a threat to his amicable relations with her hubby.
I turned to my boss, a working class Irish Catholic former combat Marine from Carbondale, PA, for guidance. "Fuck him!" he told me. "Write a memo to the files." I asked, "A what?" He explained that it was "SOP" (standard operating procedure) for employees to record on paper anything that appeared to be unethical, illegal or unjust. By law, no one may order a U.S. consular officer to issue a visa, not even the president. This is to protect officers from undue influence or pressure, to ensure that s/he makes decisions based on the law and the regs only. I refused the visa. My boss backed me up. The CG was helpless to do anything about it. I did write a memo to the files, duly notarized, describing the whole episode. Should the CG later seek to take it out on me, or if he managed to get another officer to issue the visa, I could whip out my memo to the files in a grievance action against him. Bureaucrats call this "CYA" - cover your ass. But, like Hašek's The Good Soldier Schweik, the smart functionary also writes these things to expose corruption and hypocrisy in government.
In subsequent tours of duty, I experienced more such incidents. The ambassador at one of my posts placed great pressure on the consular chief, then on me (even though I was not involved with consular work) to issue visitor visas to an array of corrupt scumbag local officials, some with blood on their hands from human rights abuses. Lacking any integrity, this ambassador placed currying favor with host country officials over U.S. law. We refused and each wrote memos to the files. In another case, I documented in memos to the file the odd and deranged behavior of an embassy secretary. I later was asked to produce these memos when her behavior finally caught the eye of the security people. A bureaucrat to the bitter end, for some reason, I still hold on to these papers, that is the unclassified ones. In fact, I have a whole folder of memoranda to the files covering frictions I'd had over the years relating to political, human resources and corruption matters. I only had to pull these magic bullets out twice in my career - on the weirdo secretary and to blunt the efforts of a particularly mean-spirited superior out to sink my career. He, by the way, was "selected out" of the Foreign Service, a euphemism for involuntary professional defenestration.
Much has been made in the past several days over ex-FBI Director James Comey's memos to the files over his meetings with President Trump, particularly in regard to the latter's alleged requests to Comey to drop the FBI's investigation into fired national security advisor Mike Flynn's dealings with Russian officials. When I read about Comey's handy-dandy memos, I nodded and thought, "Yep. Done by a true-blue bureaucrat." Apparently, FBI agents are trained to regularly record all manner of official dealings. They often are needed in legal proceedings related to their case work. But Comey did the right thing, fully cognizant that any dealings with this unhinged president could have dire consequences.
An inveterate memo maven was notorious Nixon aide, H.R. Haldeman. He kept a daily diary throughout his four-year tenure at the Nixon White House. Totaling a quarter of a million words, an abridged version was published as The Haldeman Diaries after his death. But it was Haldeman who was a transgressor. His conviction for conspiracy and obstruction of justice got him a two-and-a-half to eight year sentence in federal prison. A lot of good his CYA memos did him.
So, the news media shouldn't make such a big deal out of James Comey's habit of writing memos to the files, as significant as they may turn out to be as investigators close in on what may turn out to be a felonious administration. As I write this, there are legions of Schweik-inspired civil servants busily drafting and squirreling away their own memos to the files.