Former Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz said former FBI Director James Comey appears to have engaged in the same “sneaky” behavior as Hillary Clinton.
A new report said the Justice Department’s inspector general referred Comey to Attorney General William Barr for likely leaking classified information when he gave a friend, after getting fired in May 2017, a memo that described a discussion he had with President Trump.
Although the DOJ has reportedly declined to prosecute, Chaffetz agreed that Comey was caught “red-handed” and connected Comey’s actions to Clinton and the private email server she used during her time as secretary of state.
“Director Comey was so self-righteous in telling the world he didn’t leak, he didn’t do sneaky things, and that he knew the law better than anybody else. But when the FBI goes to your home and gets memos that reveal evidently we have to see if this is true, but confidential and classified information,” the former Utah lawmaker told anchor Bill Hemmer.
He was referring to a disclosure by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which announced Wednesday it had obtained an FBI log about special agents arriving at Comey’s home in June 2017 to retrieve his memos. The notes show Comey handed over four of them to the FBI agents, and he said to the best of his recollection two might be missing.
“One of the allegations in there, Bill, is that there were code names and the real names of people that were informants for the FBI,” Chaffetz said. “You can’t just take that information and put it into your own personal — have it personally. You just can’t do that. And how ironic because that was the allegation against Hillary Clinton that there was classified information in a nonclassified setting. That’s why the inspector general for the intelligence community made the recommendation to the Department of Justice to pursue an investigation of her.”
The Hill reported on Wednesday that Inspector General Michael Horowitz sent a referral to the Justice Department about one of the memos Comey leaked to a friend. Although prosecutors found the watchdog’s findings compelling, they decided against prosecution under classified information protection laws because of there being too much uncertainty surrounding Comey’s intent. Comey has denied leaking classified information in his memos.
As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Chaffetz was a leading investigator into Clinton’s used of an unauthorized email server in the basement of her Chappaqua, New York residence. The FBI conducted its own investigation, and Comey publicly recommended in 2016 that no charges be brought against Clinton, who was then a candidate for president, but admonished Clinton and her colleagues for being “extremely careless” in handling information that was classified retroactively.
A month after he was fired, Comey testified to Congress he had leaked his notes to a friend to give to the media, hoping that it would spark a special counsel investigation. Then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel the day after the New York Times first reported on details from one of Comey’s leaked memos, which claimed Trump pressed his FBI director to drop an investigation into his national security adviser Michael Flynn. That memo was classified as “confidential” — the lowest classification level — after Comey sent the information.
Chaffetz divulged a one-on-one conversation he had with Comey on handling classified material, stressing the dichotomy in the former FBI director’s words and actions.
“We now know that Comey knew that the FBI had come and taken this information. But that is by its very definition sneaky in the way he did it but he also — you can’t take classified information. I had a personal conversation, Bill, with Director Comey where he explained to me you can’t read classified information and then summarize it in your own language and put it in a place that’s not secure. You can’t do that,” Chaffetz said.
“I had a one-on-one conversation with him. We talked directly about that. He explained to me you cannot summarize classified information, put it in your own handwriting and then hold onto it personally. That’s why he was pursuing Hillary Clinton but it appears he did the very same thing himself,” he added.
