I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But I will bear true faith and allegiance to the sea that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

So help me God, so help me God.

So help me God.

Welcome to the Oath, I'm Chuck Rosenberg and I am honored to be your host for a series of fascinating conversations with interesting people from the world of public service.

Today, Jim Comey, the former director of the FBI, is back.

If you haven't heard my first interview with Jim, please go back and listen to learn more about his formative experiences as a young prosecutor in the storied Southern District of New York office in Manhattan, where he prosecuted the Mafia.

Today, we pick up with Jim in 1993. He has just returned to public service this time in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Richmond, Virginia, where he confronted one of the highest per capita murder rates in the nation.

I was on my way to breakfast with the deputy chief of the police department one morning and he got a call over the radio and asked me whether I would mind stopping at a crime scene with him.

So I said, sure. And we stopped in an intersection in Richmond and there's a new pickup truck sitting at a stop sign and there's a woman in the driver's seat looks like she's napping leaning back against the headrest.

And as we are closer, we see that she has a small hole in her left temple and a much bigger hole on the other side of her head where the bullet exited.

She had stopped on her way to work to buy drugs, gotten into some sort of argument with the dealer who shot her in broad daylight at his spot.

Makes no sense for all kinds of reasons, but these were the kind of killings we were seeing all over Richmond.

And it was murder as an afterthought. And so I was part of an effort with federal state and local law enforcement to see if we couldn't change the behavior of the law.

The behavior of criminals in Richmond to drive down the murder rate and it focused on trying to make them think more about their possession of firearms because there were no carefully planned murders in Richmond.

It was all what you say what you do and then it'd be a shootout. We were trying to use federal sentencing to scare them into being away from their guns keeping a distance from their guns and we thought that might drive down homicide.

So we didn't call this project exile. Where do you get the name from?

The notion that this was about taking criminals who were terrorizing the community and removing them from the community, exiling them from the community.

And a big part of the campaign was to scare them and one of the elements of that scaring was the prospect of going far away from where you would normally go, which is the Richmond City Jail.

We're going to send you to South Dakota. We're going to send you to Big Ben, Texas. So is the notion even though you're working with a state and local partners of federalizing gun violence.

Right. Using federal punishment for gun possession crimes to impose stiff penalties, which they weren't getting in the state system and to remove them from the community physically in a way that was a source of deterrence. It scared people.

Do you think it worked? I think it surely contributed to a significant drop in Richmond's homicide from the kind of cases that the Richmond PD was reporting where they were seeing a drop in homicides. It was all of those happenstance homicides, but the drug related crime dropped significantly.

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