President Barack Obama is reportedly ready to nominate former Lockheed Martin Corp. general counsel James Comey to head the FBI. It might be helpful, then, to look back at what others have said about Comey through the years, as well as at statements he has made.

Comey served as a federal prosecutor from 1987 through 2003, including two years as U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. He was named deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush from 2003 to 2005, when he left to become GC at Lockheed. He left that job in June 2010 to become a manager at Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut hedge fund. Earlier this year, he became a senior research scholar and Hertog fellow on national security law at Columbia Law School.

Here, then, are some insights we’ve gathered from articles, quotes, and a video about him:

  • May 15, 2007, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), just before Comey addressed the Senate Judiciary Committee [PDF] on the infamous visit to the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft: “As far as I’m concerned, when the Justice Department lost Jim Comey, it lost a towering figure. And I don’t say that because he stands 6’8” tall. When Jim left the department, we lost a public servant of the first order, a man of unimpeachable integrity, honesty, character, and independence.”
  • January 2008, from a CorpCounsel.com story about Lockheed’s Deepwater shipbuilding project: “These days Lockheed Martin’s new general counsel speaks often about ethics to audiences inside and outside the company. In fact, his Mr. Clean persona is undoubtedly one of the factors that made James Comey an attractive hire.”
  • January 2008, from a short CorpCounsel profile of Comey: Lockheed deputy GC Scott MacKay comments on Comey’s testimony before Congress: “People have responded extremely positively. It shows that Jim walks the walk, he doesn’t just talk the talk [about ethics].”
  • May 2009, Comey speaking at a New York University Law School symposium on criminal prosecution of corporations: “I believed then [during the Enron era] and still do that prosecution of the entity could not be off the table. That threat of prosecution focused the mind, the collective consciousness of the organization, in way that it could not be focused if the threat were not there.” ( See his complete speech here.)
  • July 2009, from a CorpCounsel article on the corporate monitor for American International Group, Inc.: “Comey emphatically defends non-prosecution agreements and [the use of corporate] monitors, saying that they were especially needed in the post-Enron era to address public outrage. ‘Our mission then was to change the organization,’ he said, an objective best achieved, he believes, by supervised reform.”

See also: "Obama’s Reported FBI Pick Willing to Ruffle Feathers," from The National Law Journal.