Former FBI Director James Comey violated FBI policies in his handling of memos documenting private conversations with President Donald Trump, the Justice Department’s inspector general said Thursday.
The watchdog office said Comey broke bureau rules by giving one memo containing unclassified information to a friend with instructions to share the contents with a reporter.
In simpler terms, Comey was trigger happy to try and implicate the president, so he dished important documents to a friend.
But he overstepped his bounds in a BIG way.
One week after he was fired, Comey provided a copy of the memo about Flynn to Dan Richman, his personal lawyer and a close friend, and instructed him to share the contents with a specific reporter from The New York Times.
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Comey also failed to notify the FBI after he was dismissed in May 2017 that he had retained some of the memos in a safe at home, the report said. FBI agents retrieved four of Comey’s memos from his house weeks after he was fired.
“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 says.
Although he won’t be sought out for prosecution, at this rate it’s clear that Comey has a talent for breaking the rules… and his high-profile action could lead to an enormous level of future FBI corruption.
At issue in the report are seven memos Comey wrote between January 2017 and April 2017 about conversations with Trump that he found unnerving or unusual.
Comey has said he wanted to release those conversations with the sole focus of having a special counsel appointed to the so-called collusion case.
The inspector general’s office wasn’t buying Comey’s phony excuses.
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“What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome,” it adds.
Comey, whose become more of public celebrity these days, took to Twitter to defend himself, writing that he only shared unclassified documents, not classified documents. But what Comey is missing is that the entire issue is about principle and motive, rather than what information was actually leaked.
Real Americans know that Comey only did what he did to try dragging Trump’s name through the mud — nothing more than a gesture of personal vendetta.
“I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a “sorry we lied about you” would be nice,” he wrote.
DOJ IG "found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media." I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a “sorry we lied about you” would be nice.
— James Comey (@Comey) August 29, 2019
He also added: “And to all those who’ve spent two years talking about me “going to jail” or being a “liar and a leaker”–ask yourselves why you still trust people who gave you bad info for so long, including the president.”
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And to all those who’ve spent two years talking about me “going to jail” or being a “liar and a leaker”—ask yourselves why you still trust people who gave you bad info for so long, including the president.
— James Comey (@Comey) August 29, 2019
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Comey can deflect all he wants, but the the truth remains that he got caught, and that Trump wasn’t so crazy to fire Comey after all.
He mishandled information with Hillary Clinton.
He mishandled information with Trump.
That sounds like a guy who was never fit enough for the position he held — he couldn’t perform his job.
And the latest evidence proved just that.
The Horn editorial team and The Associated Press contributed to this article