Here’s to the Notetakers: How Comey’s Memo Validated My Schoolgirl Habits

My whole life, I’ve been that girl with the ponytail, scribbling furiously in her notebook. Trying to keep pace with my teachers and professors, drawing arrows and diagrams to help make sense of a mess of letters and lines.

My penmanship is terrible and always has been. But if I didn’t write it down, I wouldn’t remember it. And if I didn’t remember it, it might as well never have happened. Writing it down made it official. Real. My notes became gospel.

And so I slogged through my ghastly handwriting, recopying my notes to create study guides, drilling the knowledge and learning deeper and deeper into my brain.

You could say I was studious. Thorough. Or, as one of the suggested options on the feedback checklist from my elementary school report cards, “conscientious and dependable.”

Then I got my first job doing opinion research, where I had to sift through datasets and run regressions to understand the story inside the data. I relied on output in spreadsheets, graphs, and charts to draw conclusions. But just as often, I sat on the dark side of a two-way mirror, observing as 10-person focus groups gave their opinion on products and issues.

I took notes on their age, gender, and race. Their tone and level of enthusiasm. I took notes on what they said. I took notes on what they didn’t say. To be honest, those notes were the main reason I was good at my job.

So I never quite understood the people who showed up to class or meetings without a notepad or, at the very least, a laptop. How would they ever remember what anyone said, who gave what feedback, or who promised to do what?

And then I realized, it was because I was there, taking copious notes while they pontificated and gestured and fidgeted. While they “added value” and discounted mine.

I always resented their lack of preparedness—and to be fair, I still do. Couldn’t someone else take responsibility for taking notes? It feels both sexist AND ageist to be the only one there scrawling every last word and action item. When they ask me to email my notes, it feels like they see me as some dowdy, inert Mad Men secretary with no opinions. Just there to record the real decision-makers.

But those colleagues and classmates who left the record-keeping to someone else are forgetting one major thing, made obvious by James Comey, a complex public figure whose legacy is still yet to be determined.

This week, Comey released a memo in which he detailed that President Trump urged him to shut down the investigation into former NSA adviser Michael Flynn. “I hope you can let this go,” Trump said, according to the memo. And with a notetaker as diligent as Comey, letting something go is the one thing he simply won’t do.

The memo—written less than a week after Trump abruptly fired Comey—set off a swift chain reaction that seemed both necessary and imminent, resulting in the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, appointing a special prosecutor to oversee the probe of Russian interference in the presidential election.

This is big news, particularly when it seemed as though none of Trump’s previous transgressions or missteps have truly harmed him. His supporters seemed unbothered by his lies, gaslighting, vilifying the media, and misogynistic, Islamophobic, racist, and anti-immigrant comments. In fact, some seemed emboldened by them. But this might just stick. This might just lead to justice.

When you’re the only one in the room taking notes, you own the official record. You control the narrative. You hold the truth. So here’s to the documenters. The record-keepers. The conscientious and dependable notetakers. We need you more than ever.