The Inspector General of the Department of Justice issued a finding Thursday that former FBI Director James Comey was in violation of both FBI policies and his employment agreement, after leaking memos of his conversations with Donald Trump to a friend who leaked them to the New York Times, one of which contained classified information. The Hill:
He [DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz] also refuted Comey’s claims that his memos were not FBI records but personal recollections, stating that the director was operating in an official capacity and that he acknowledged in his FBI Employment Agreement that “[a]ll information acquired by [Comey] in connection with [his] official duties with the FBI…remain[s] the property of the United States of America.”
“Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility,” the 83-page report says. “By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.”
The report states that Comey provided one unclassified memo that contained sensitive information to a friend with instructions to share its contents with a reporter. The report notes that the inspector general found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys shared classified information from the memos with members of the media.
What has to be borne in mind here, to understand Comey’s actions in the proper context, is that in a normal administration, one could reasonably judge Comey’s behavior as the Inspector General here did. However, the Trump administration is anything but normal. Donald Trump asked the director of the FBI to break the law. That is not standard operating procedure. Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures.
2/ Comey faced an extraordinary situation. The President of the United States asked him for his “loyalty” and then asked him to drop a criminal investigation of his friend.
In the face of Presidential corruption, Comey took extraordinary steps.
— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) August 29, 2019
4/ I appreciate that the IG was tasked with investigating Comey, not Trump.
If Comey’s critics, who take Comey to task but suggest we don’t address the problem that caused Comey to ask this way—corrupt acts by Trump—should not be taken seriously. /end
— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) August 29, 2019
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am no defender of James Comey, because I firmly believe that his epistle to the House of Representatives a week before election day 2016 about Hillary Clinton’s emails was a decisive factor in her losing the election. However, I believe that he acted prudently, conservatively even, in dealing with Trump’s blatantly illegal and unethical overtures to him about Michael Flynn. Again, the watchword here has to be “normalization.” Donald Trump is not a normal president and his administration has so far been a travesty. It stands to reason that government employees and other political professionals are going to behave outside the norms in reacting to it all.
But none of the stuff Comey released was classified in any way, and it was all his own notes, done for himself. The IG is lying.
Laurence Tribe is challenging the DOJ’s right to having a ‘secret body of law” where all the evidence and notes is kept private. i agree with him. This is more than some administrative function, this concerns everybody.
This whole thing boils down to technicalities and even some hypocrisy on the IG’s part. The memos Comey wrote about his various conversations/meetings with Trump weren’t in a personal diary on his computer at home, but rather what are called memos to file. Many people have written a CYA memo to file at work about something that happened in order to create a record which will have weight in any investigation/proceeding or even in court should someone come asking someday. From where I sit, the memos Comey wrote to file were quite justified and in fact he’d have been derelict had he not written them.
The technicality part is that he wrote them about his work as FBI Director on an FBI computer about FBI business specifically to create an FBI record. It’s not unlike a form of the ubiquitous “302” that FBI Special Agents create after every interview. Such notes are not typically released to the press or public, or even made part of court proceedings – 302s help FBI agents accurately recall what was said & by whom in the course of tons of other information they gather. It can be used in drafting formal court filings or even referred to by an agent on the witness stand before they answer questions but the 302 itself is not typically public even in court as part of the record. There are of course exceptions which if you recall the GOP led a too successful fight to gain access to. Anyway 302s, and even memos to file that Comey wrote in lieu of a 302 are FBI work product and the rules about them staying “in house” are long-standing and/or well established.
As you say however Comey faced extraordinary circumstances since this involved a President engaged in highly inappropriate conduct that at times crossed over into flat out illegality that would with any other individual result in a criminal referral to prosecutors. So, taking care not to release any classified information Comey ensured some of the material that was in fact FBI work product made it to a reporter.
He broke a rule. He did NOT break any laws.
The IG’s use of phrases like “sensitive material/information” in conjunction with the words classified information is I believe intended to conflate the two. Of course what Comey released was sensitive, as it did after all point out this President engaged in violating not only norms but laws. But again Comey only broke with policy/rules.
There are good reasons why the FBI has rules against releasing information about ongoing investigations except under certain conditions. Generally speaking long-standing policy has not been to release anything unless/until criminal charges are recommended/filed. “Editorializing” about conduct when no charges have been filed has always been a big no-no, and Comey doing so back when Clinton was cleared of criminal charges in the email investigation was widely and properly criticized.
Yet the IG has just done the same thing.
The whole freaking purpose of an IG is to add a layer that’s hyper correct about all matters. If Comey didn’t break any laws then the only public statement should have been something along the lines of “The IG’s investigation has concluded that former FBI Director James Comey broke no laws and released no classified information in the memos he turned over to his lawyer which were forwarded to a reporter.” That’s it. Let Trump and the GOP scream all they want. IG’s aren’t supposed to give a fuck about politics and optics. The fact Horowitz decided to editorialize PUBLICLY when he also criticized Comey for having done so is another sad, and worse disturbing sign of how much the DOJ has been politicized.
And AP’s story, which gets picked up by media all over the country, makes Comey look even worse than the actual report does.