FBI
Director's Leaked Trump Memos Contained
Classified Information
By Tyler
Durden
July
10, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Amid the constant media outrage over
everything Trump, Trump, Trump, some
might have forgotten that in the political
rollercoaster over the past 12 months, there
were numerous other high-profile individuals
involved, including not
only former DOJ head Loretta Lynch, whose
every interaction with the Clinton campaign is
about to be probed under a Congressional
microscope, but the man who some say started it
all: former FBI Director James Comey.
First loved by the Democrats when he
personally absolved Hillary Clinton of any sins
regarding her (ab)use of her personal email
server, then furiously loathed when he reopened
the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton one week
before the election, then finally getting into a
feud with President Trump which cost his him
job, Comey ultimately admitted to leaking at
least one memo which contained personal
recollections of his conversations with the
president, in hopes of launching a special probe
into the president's alleged Russian collusion.
There was just one problem: according to a
blockbuster report from The Hill, in
addition to the leaked memos, Comey also
leaked classified information in gross and
direct violation of FBI rules and regulations.
And just like that Comey finds himself
in trouble. Only not just any trouble, but the
virtually same trouble that Hillary Clinton was
in in the summer of 2016... and which James
Comey was tasked to investigate.
We'll repeat the above because it bears
repeating: in the purest definition of irony,
James Comey is about to be investigated
for the exact same thing which he absolved
Hillary Clinton of doing last summer.
Almost as if neither Comey nor Clinton were
aware of - or willing to abide by - the security
protocol of the agency they were in charge of.
Aside from once again confirming that Trump
may have been right all along in his accusation
of the ex-FBI chief's motives, this shocking
revelation raises the possibility that
Comey broke his own agency’s rules - by
putting his own interests above those of his
country - but far more grotesquely,
ignored the same security protocol that he
publicly criticized Hillary Clinton for in the
waning days of the 2016 presidential election,
in order to settle his vendetta with President
Trump.
Amusingly, Comey's alleged flagrant disregard
for FBI regulations would explain why he also
found Clinton's email server transgressions to
not be a material concern, contrary to what most
Republicans claimed at the time. After all, if
it was good - or rather not bad enough for
Clinton, maybe it was the same with Comey's own
abuse of confidential data?
The only
problem is that while Comey was generous enough
to let Hillary go, now that the ex-FBI chief is
facing the president of the US as his adversary,
he may not be quite so lucky.
Upon hearing of Comey's alleged
transgressions, the now former Chair of the
House Oversight Committee said simply that "IF
true, this is bombshell news."
Incidentally, the first to warn of Comey's
imminent headaches, was
Breitbart News,
which on Friday reported that a new Senate
report said
recent leaks by former FBI Director James
Comey’s leaking of memos could “potentially harm
national security.” The report, released by the
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee on Thursday, found that there
were 125 separate leaks in President Trump’s
first 126 days that were potentially damaging to
national security. The report said it included
Comey’s leaking of his memos after he was fired
by Trump in May.
* * *
Comey's
troubles started when he testified under oath
last month that he considered the memos he
prepared to be personal documents and that he
shared at least one of them with a Columbia
University lawyer friend. As Comey later
disclosed, 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.
The
Hill recounts that particular exchange with
Senator Roy Blunt:
“So
you didn’t consider your memo or your sense
of that conversation to be a government
document?,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) asked
Comey on June 8. “You considered it to be,
somehow, your own personal document that you
could share to 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. Additionally, he added, “My view was that
the content of those unclassified,
memorialization of those conversations was my
recollection recorded.”
That's when the problems escalated, because
according to The Hill - which for the first time
disclosed that the total number of memos linked
to Comey's nine conversations with Trump - 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.
Oops.
As The Hill reveals,
four, or more than half, of the seven
memos had markings making clear they contained
information classified at the “secret” or
“confidential” level, according
to officials directly familiar with the matter.
This is a major problem for Comey because
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.
FBI
policy further 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 written
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 about 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
afterwards, the sources said.
Meanwhile, Congressional investigators have
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.
Where
things get especially ironic, is that this was
the same issue the FBI - under Comey -
investigated in 2015-16 about Clinton’s private
email server, at the time the most sensitive and
controversial issue of the Clinton campaign,
where as secretary of State she and top aides
moved classified information through insecure
channels.
Ultimately, Comey concluded in July 2016 that
Clinton’s email practices were reckless, but
that he could not recommend prosecution because
FBI agents had failed to find enough evidence
that she intended to violate felony statutes
prohibiting the transmission of classified
information through insecure practices. While
the news initially was loved by Democrats as it
let Hillary get off scott-free from any
potential criminal probe, Comey's subsequent
decision to restart the FBI probe into Clinton's
email server one week before the election is
what eventually prompted both Hillary and John
Podesta to claim that James Comey was one of the
two factors that cost Clinton the presidency...
along with the "Russian hacking" of course.
The
only problem is that while there is yet no
evidence of Russian hacking, suddenly with the
factual emergence of Comey's
transgression, questions may emerge not only
into the ex-FBI chief's actions and motives, but
whether the FBI's clearance of Clinton's use of
an email server under Comey was proper after
all...
* * *
So what
happens next? According to The Hill,
congressional investigators are likely to turn
their attention to the same issues to determine
if Comey mishandled any classified information
in his personal memos.
In
order to make an assessment, congressional
investigators will have to tackle key questions,
such as:
-
Where and how were the memos were created,
such as whether they were written on an
insecure computer or notepad.
-
Where and how the memos were stored, such as
inside his home, his briefcase or an
insecure laptop.
-
Were any memos shown to private individuals
without a security clearance and did those
memos contain any classified information
-
When was it determined by the government
that the memos contained classified
information, before Comey took them and
shared one or after.
One
avenue for answering those questions is for a
panel like Senate Intelligence, House
Intelligence or Senate Judiciary to refer the
matter to the Justice Department’s internal
watchdog, the inspector general, or to the
Director of National Intelligence and its
inspector general. One thing is certain: the
near-future will see many more of
Comey's sworn Congressional testimonies,
and the vendetta between Trump and Comey is
about to not only be rekindled but escalate to
previously unseen levels. For an appetizer of
what's to come, look closely at Trump's twitter
feed once the president learns the news of
Comey's alleged transgressions.
This article was first published by
ZeroHedge
-
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The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
