On Thursday night, the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, interviewed the former F.B.I. director James Comey during a live taping of “The New Yorker Radio Hour.” Sitting in a low-slung armchair on the stage of the Town Hall theatre, in midtown Manhattan, Comey talked through the most contentious and consequential decisions he made as F.B.I. director during the 2016 campaign and the early months of Donald Trump’s Presidency, and offered his thoughts on the President and his conduct in office.

“I think he has an emptiness inside of him, and a hunger for affirmation, that I’ve never seen in an adult,” Comey told Remnick at one point. “It’s all, ‘What will fill this hole?’ ”

Last May, Trump fired Comey, who at the time was overseeing the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election. In the aftermath of his firing, Comey leaked to the press that Trump had urged him to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national-security adviser, setting off an uproar that ended in the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate the Russian interference case. A few weeks later, Comey testified in the Senate about his interactions with the President. Since then, save for the stray tweet here and there about leadership or public service, Comey has mostly stayed out of the headlines. The publication this week of his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” has given Comey the opportunity to revisit his tenure as F.B.I. director. On Thursday, Remnick in particular pressed Comey to explain and defend his handling of the conclusion of the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server as Secretary of State.

“Why did you bother at all?” Remnick asked, referring to Comey’s decision to hold a press conference, by himself, in July, 2016, to announce that no charges would be filed in the Clinton case, but to say, nevertheless, that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information. “Why not come out and say, ‘Nothing to see here,’ and go home?”

“Because I thought that, without transparency, public trust and confidence in the integrity of our work would be severely undercut,” Comey said.

Comey said that while he felt “tremendous pain over the prospect that we played any role” in the outcome of the election, he didn’t feel that he had made any wrong decisions along the way. Speaking of his decision, that October, to inform Congress that a trove of Clinton’s e-mails had been found on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman who was married to Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin, Comey said that he still felt he and his team had handled things “the right way.” The e-mails turned out to contain no new information to change the F.B.I.’s determination on the case, but it made the investigation a major story in the closing days of the campaign. Still, Comey said, if he could go back, he would not change his own actions. If he had the power of time travel, he said, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have opted to use a private e-mail server to begin with, or “Anthony Weiner probably would have never been born.”

Remnick also asked Comey about a Times article that ran on October 31, 2016, under the headline “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Remnick asked Comey, “Why would the F.B.I. push that story on the New York Times a week before the election?”

“Yeah, that’s a hard one to answer. I don’t know who the F.B.I. is in this context,” Comey said, referring to the newspaper’s sources. Comey confirmed that, among other things, the F.B.I. had concluded by that point that the Russian government was supporting Trump’s campaign.

“You’re saying that the Times’ F.B.I. sources on that story were wrong?” Remnick asked.

Comey, cautioning that he was limited in what he could say, responded by saying, “At least with respect to what the goals of the Russian effort were, it’s just wrong.”

While Comey declined to answer some questions—like what the biggest areas of legal jeopardy for Trump were—he was unequivocal at other moments. Speaking of the President’s recent pardon of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Comey said, “That pardon is an attack on the rule of law. There’s a reason that President George W. Bush, for whom Libby worked, refused to pardon the guy.” (Libby had been convicted, in 2007, of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of the name of a C.I.A officer, Valerie Plame.) When Remnick asked Comey to comment on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s silence after Trump fired him, Comey said that the question that they needed to ask themselves is, “ ‘What am I going to tell my grandchildren?’ ”

Toward the end of the interview, Remnick asked Comey if he believed Trump was a bigot. “I don’t think that I can pronounce that,” he said. But, he added, the President’s “moral equivalence” in the wake of white-supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer was “shameful.” Here, the audience interrupted him to applaud.