Former FBI Director James Comey refused to tell Congress in a classified setting about a dubious Russian intelligence document, according to a lawmaker who was in attendance.
Trey Gowdy, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who left Congress one year ago, said Comey claimed the information was “so highly classified” that he could not discuss it in setting in which he was authorized to discuss classified material.
This “fact pattern,” Gowdy said, is the focus of a New York Times report published Thursday evening that said federal prosecutors are investigating a years-old leak to reporters in 2017 about the document that factored into Comey’s handling of the FBI investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server.
“I know that fact pattern that is referenced in this story,” Gowdy said on Fox News, where he is a contributor. “Jim Comey was asked behind closed doors in a classified setting to address it, and he would not do it. His response was [that] it was so highly classified, he was not even going to tell people that were cleared to hear it in a classified setting.”
Gowdy was responding to Martha MacCallum, who asked about how the New York Times report suggested there was a political motivation behind the Justice Department’s decision to open an investigation years after the leaks took place.
“I’m not a fan of Jim Comey, but I am a fan of being fair to people. And I’m not going to indict him or convict him based on New York Times reporting,” Gowdy said. “My experience with him on this very fact pattern, the subject of the article, he would not address it even in a setting where he could do so. And it would have benefited him to do so, and he still did not do it.”
