Let’s talk about Bob Mueller. You inherited an FBI from him in 2013 that you describe as very buttoned-up and still had an overhang from the time of J. Edgar Hoover, where the main motivation was to tell the boss what he wanted to hear. Did that surprise you?

Not entirely. I’d come from eight years in the private sector where transparency is something that’s always talked about. I was a little surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t have been knowing that Hoover had been in charge for half a century, that it was less modern than I’d expected in terms of that culture.

It’s ironic that an agency dedicated to finding the truth struggles from a lack of transparency.

That struck me, too. And a lot of what I did during my four years as director was to get people to feel safe enough around me to tell me the truth.

How’d you do that?

In lots of ways, some small, some big. I tried to issue an edict on how people should dress around me, with no outer garments. If you dress like you’re in church, you’ll act like you’re in church. I took the wild step of wearing blue shirts, and it’s something everybody noticed—it was a signal that I wanted a different approach.

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