James Comey, the former FBI director who oversaw the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unlawful handling of official emails, has been chastised by the Justice Department for his improper handling of official memos.
The irony is so thick that it’s hard not to laugh. But there’s a serious problem here: Comey’s and Clinton’s actions reflect an arrogance of power and a gross disregard for the rule of law. The work that public servants produce belongs to the public. It doesn’t belong in one’s study at home or on one’s homebrewed server.
Comey, according to the Office of the Inspector General at the DOJ, brought home his memos summarizing his conversations with President Trump. He kept them in a safe at home, rather than at DOJ. When he was fired, he didn’t return the memos to the FBI. Instead, he kept the memos and then shared them, through friends, with reporters.
But these memos weren’t Comey’s to do with as he pleased. They were, quite obviously, official FBI work product, even though Comey claimed to believe otherwise. The IG wrote that “Comey’s characterization of the Memos as personal records finds no support in the law and is wholly incompatible with the plain language of the statutes, regulations, and policies defining Federal records, and the terms of Comey’s FBI Employment Agreement.”
Federal records include “all recorded information, regardless of form or characteristics, made or received by a Federal agency … in connection with the transaction of public business.”
Comey wasn’t meeting with Trump as an old friend or to talk real estate. Their meetings were clearly part of Comey doing his job. Some of the material was classified. “As Comey well knew, classified information is never considered personal property; rather, it is the property of the U.S. government.”
This probably sounds familiar if you’ve followed Comey’s career, because it’s the same sort of stuff that got Clinton in trouble.
Clinton conducted State Department business on a private secret email address based out of a server at her home. She didn’t let State Department officials know about the server. When she left the department, she didn’t turn over the records. Before she did turn them over, she first had her own private operatives purge the emails she thought she shouldn’t have to turn over — ostensibly because they were personal, rather than federal records.
The danger of putting classified information in unsafe environments is one problem with Comey’s and Clinton’s actions. But there’s an underlying problem even prior the questions about the classified information.
Public records belong to the public. Our federal transparency rules exist to make sure that government is by the consent of the governed. Clinton worked for us. Comey worked for us. We have a right to know how our government operates.
Obviously, there is some information that can’t be subject to Freedom of Information requests because it is too sensitive. But there are federal authorities whose job it is to make such determinations according to the law.
Yes, even Comey and the Clintons are under the law.
Flouting federal records rules is flouting transparency. Flouting transparency undermines democracy.
Nobody was surprised that Clinton would behave this way. But it’s a sad irony that Comey, who saw himself as the savior of the country against the scourge of Trump, would go about his mission by trampling the rule of law and the foundation of democracy.
