Former FBI Director James Comey is likely the most corrupt of the many now terminated individuals President Donald J. Trump has purged from Washington DC, but now it seems that corruption may have also violated Federal Law.
When James Comey stole (yes he stole memorandums from the FBI the moment he left the building with them) his now infamous FBI memos from the building, he violated multiple laws.
To be frank, those memos are the property of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, paid for by the United States taxpayers. To add a cherry to the top of the already heavily whipped ice cream sundae though, it now appears there was a classified information on those memos.
More than half of the memos former FBI chief James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russian investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.
This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton for in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election.
Comey testified last month he considered the memos to be personal documents and that he shared at least one of them with a Columbia University lawyer friend. He asked that lawyer to leak information from one memo to the news media in hopes of increasing pressure to get a special prosecutor named in the Russia case after Comey was fired as FBI director.
“So you didn’t consider your memo or your sense of that conversation to be a government document?,” Senator Roy Blunt asked Comey on June 8th. “You considered it to be, somehow, your own personal document that you could share with the media as you wanted through a friend?” “Correct,” Comey answered. “I understood this to be my recollection recorded of my conversation with the president. As a private citizen, I thought it important to get it out.”
Comey insisted in his testimony he believed his personal memos were unclassified, though he hinted one or two documents he created might have been contained classified information.
“I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership,” he testified about the one memo he later leaked about former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
He added, “My view was that the content of that unclassified, memorialization of those conversations was my recollection recorded.”
But when the seven memos Comey wrote regarding his nine conversations with Trump about Russia earlier this year were shown to Congress in recent days, the FBI claimed all were, in fact, deemed to be government documents.
While the Comey memos have been previously reported, this is the first time there has been a number connected to a number of the memos the ex-FBI chief wrote.
Four of the memos had markings making clear they contained information classified at the “secret” or “confidential” level, according to officials directly familiar with the matter.
A spokesman for the FBI on Sunday declined to comment.
FBI policy forbids any agent from releasing classified information or any information from ongoing investigations or sensitive operations without prior written permission and mandates that all records created during official duties are considered to be government property.
“Unauthorized disclosure, misuse, or negligent handling of information contained in the files, electronic or paper, of the FBI or which I may acquire as an employee of the FBI could impair national security, place human life in jeopardy, result in the denial of due process, prevent the FBI from effectively discharging its responsibilities, or violate federal law,” states the agreement all FBI agents sign.
It adds that “all information acquired by me in connection with my official duties with the FBI and all official material to which I have access remain the property of the United States of America” and that an agent “will not reveal, by any means, any information or material from or related to FBI files or any other information acquired by virtue of my official employment to any unauthorized recipient without prior official wrote authorization by the FBI.”
Comey indicated in his testimony the memos were in his possession when he left the bureau, leaving him in a position to leak one of them through his lawyer friend to the media. But he testified that he has since turned them over to Robert Mueller, a former FBI chief and now spearheading the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
It is not clear whether Comey as director signed the same agreement as his agents, but the contract is considered the official policy of the Bureau. It was also unclear when the documents were shown to Congress whether the information deemed "secret" or "confidential" was classified at the time Comey wrote the memos or determined so afterward, the sources said.
Congressional investigators had already begun examining whether Comey’s creation, storage, and sharing of the memos violated FBI rules, but the revelation that four of the seven memos included some sort of classified information opens a new door of inquiry into whether classified information was mishandled, improperly stored or improperly shared.
Ironically, that was the same issue the FBI investigated in 2015 to 2916 under Comey’s reign about Clinton’s private email server, where as Secretary of State she and top aides moved classified information through multiple insecure channels.
Comey ultimately concluded in July of 2016 that Clinton’s email practices were not just reckless, but that he could not recommend prosecution because FBI agents had failed to find nearly enough evidence that she intended to violate felony statutes which would have been in place prohibiting the transmission of classified information through insecure practices.
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of the classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," he said in a decision panned by Republicans and embraced by Democrats.
Now, Congressional investigators are likely to turn their attention to the same issues to determine if Comey mishandled any classified information in his personal memos. An ironic twist of fate for the fallen FBI Director, but we can hope that justice is served finally.
Source:
And how make laws have Trump and Co broken?
Justice is only served when 'all' the guilty are brought to justice.