On May 10, 2017, less than 24 hours after President Trump fired James Comey as F.B.I. director, Comey received an email from a man he had never met. The correspondent, Matt Latimer, began by praising Comey's “decades of faithful service to the United States government and to the cause of law and order” and offering sympathy for the “tumultuous period” he was going through. Then Latimer got to the heart of the matter. As the head of a Washington literary agency called Javelin, he wanted Comey to know that if he ever had any interest in writing a book — “and we'd urge you to consider the possibility” — he wanted Comey as a client.
“Javelin is prepared to invest in you and your story,” Latimer wrote. “It's the least we can do for someone who has given so much to our country.”
Comey did not want to write a book. He sent Latimer a polite response saying as much. But several months later, he began to warm to the idea, and he thought back on his correspondence with Latimer. “There was something about the tone of his email,” Comey recently told me. “I just liked the tone.”
Latimer and Keith Urbahn, Latimer's partner at Javelin, went to lunch with Comey at his golf club. “Their pitch was, ‘We will be your partner in a way that's unusual for the literary-agency business,' ” Comey recalled. Before they were literary agents, Latimer and Urbahn were Republican operatives, and they viewed a book project as akin to a political campaign. They told Comey that they would not only work with him on a proposal and shop it to publishers; they would also help him with the writing, social media presence, publicity and what they called the “messaging” of the whole project. They promised to offer “brutal feedback” at all times. “One of the big challenges in any place, but especially in Washington, is getting people to tell you the unvarnished truth, especially if you stink,” Comey said. “I knew I could count on these guys to tell me when I sucked.”
Read Full Article »