Comey was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday about the government's attempt to force Apple to write software than undoes its own security protocols.

But Comey has faced considerably tougher questions in his career. Before becoming FBI director, he was the deputy assistant attorney general in George W. Bush's Justice Department, where he pushed back on certain elements of the Bush-Cheney torture and surveillance programs — but ended up signing off on both.

In April 2004, several months after Comey arrived at DOJ, news broke that U.S. soldiers had tortured prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq. Two months later, reporters discovered a memo written in August 2002 by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, which outlined a particularly aberrant legal theory for circumventing the U.S.' anti-torture laws.

The Justice Department, with Comey's support, retracted that memo soon after it became public. But it did not retract a second memo — which didn't become public until 2009 — that grotesquely outlined a list of very specific authorized torture tactics, including stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding.