James Clapper, America’s spy chief under President Barack Obama, said he believes the Justice Department made the right call by declining to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey for how he handled his memos that documented his interactions with President Trump.
“I think it was the right decision for two reasons, both in the interest of fairness and well as more practical,” Clapper said on CNN.
Clapper, who was director of national intelligence and is now a CNN national security analyst, said he was certain Comey would have ensured there was no classified information in his notes.
“I’m quite sure — I never saw the memos in question — but I’m quite sure that Jim in his own mind took great care to ensure that there was not classified information,” Clapper said.
One person with a dissenting view on Comey’s behavior is Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. One of the memos, obtained by FBI agents from Comey at his house one month after he was fired in 2017, was labeled as “secret.” According to a newly released FBI log, Comey said it was a mislabel, and there was no classified information in the memo.
Still, Nunes told Fox News, “the whole idea that you can take something that is marked ‘Secret//No Foreign’ and then just decide on your own to take that out of the SCIF, so out of a controlled area and not handled properly and take to someone’s house, or a university or wherever these memos went to. You just can’t do that.” He also suggested that such a move would be illegal.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz sent a referral to the Justice Department about the memos Comey leaked to a friend to give to the press, which he told Congress under oath he did in the hopes they would spark a special counsel investigation. Although prosecutors found the watchdog’s findings compelling, they decided against prosecution under classified information protection laws because of there being too much uncertainty regarding Comey’s intent. Comey has denied leaking classified information, but two of his memos were deemed confidential, the lowest form of classification, after an FBI review.
Clapper said he was curious what the rationale was for classifying them, even at such a low level. He concluded that “justice was served by refusing to prosecute,” noting that the DOJ would have a “hard time making a case before a judge.”
