A professor who former FBI Director James Comey relied upon to leak his memos to the press just after he was fired is disputing a new report that said Comey’s memos were classified.
Those memos detailed Comey’s recollections of the conversations he had with President Trump, including the conversation in which the president allegedly encouraged Comey to drop the investigation into former national security advisor Mike Flynn.
Columbia University professor Daniel Richman said the new report by The Hill “is a non-story.”
“No memos were given to the press, and no memos were classified at the time I received them,” Richman told Fox News.
The Hill’s report published late Sunday claimed that “More than half of the memos former FBI Director James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.”
The report even garnered reaction from President Trump, who tweeted, “James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!”
The report by the Hill said there were seven memos in total, and that four of them had markings of “secret” or “confidential” to indicate they were classified.
In sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June, Comey admitted that he used, “A good friend of mine who’s a professor at Columbia Law School” to launder the contents of the documents to the New York Times. Comey even divulged at the time that his motivation in doing so was to hopefully trigger the appointment of a special counsel, which did happen days later after the memo story was published.
In that same testimony, Comey said he had authored the memos with the intent that they were the recollections of a private citizen, and that he had intentionally tried to make their contents free of classified information.
