What, Exactly, Is James Comey’s Definition of ‘Leak’?

Comey’s defense is that he met with the president in his capacity as FBI director and immediately wrote a memo about it on FBI equipment, but that memo was for his personal use, not an official FBI document. McCarthy concludes that this distinction is “untenable” and in clear violation of his FBI employment agreement that states, “All information acquired by me in connection with my official duties with the FBI and all official material to which I have access remain the property of the United States of America.”

Nonetheless, Comey is trying to split hairs. His defense when he leaked the memo to the New York Times through a friend, Columbia law professor Dan Richman (who later turned out to be his personal attorney), is that he had already been fired by Trump. Therefore it wasn’t a leak, because he was a private citizen passing on his allegedly private “aide-mémoire” (Comey’s own phrase, in a recent interview) to the Times.

But there are questions about whether Comey was involved with other leaks unrelated to the memos. Last June, Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had been tacitly encouraged by the Obama administration to downplay the Clinton email investigation. “The attorney general [Loretta Lynch] had directed me not to call it an ‘investigation’ but instead to call it a ‘matter’ which confused me and concerned me,” he told Congress.

This was a curious admission on Comey’s part because in April there had been a splashy New York Times story, “Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election.” The story was published April 22, 2017, just a couple of weeks before Comey’s May 9 firing by President Trump. Notably, the Times story reported the following:

The fact that the Times’ reporting and Comey’s congressional testimony lined up so neatly, wasn’t lost on me, when I wrote last June: “If Comey wasn’t one of the anonymous sources for this New York Times story directly, whoever did supply all this information to the Times seems to have been inordinately concerned with burnishing Comey’s reputation as an impartial law man and otherwise justifying his heavily criticized handling of the Clinton email investigation last year.” Comey’s friend Dan Richman, who leaked Comey’s memo to the Times, is quoted in the April Times story about Lynch leaning on Comey to go easy on Clinton.

The Times story also contains this tidbit: “[A] document, which has been described as both a memo and an email, was written by a Democratic operative who expressed confidence that Ms. Lynch would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far, according to several former officials familiar with the document.” This email was apparently classified. Baier asked Comey about this, and it resulted in this exchange:

Clearly, there are a number of important questions surrounding Comey’s conduct and and to what degree he may have been directly or indirectly responsible for a number of significant leaks. Especially when you consider in the interview, Baier played a clip of exchange between Comey and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley:

And Baier didn’t play the exchange that followed, but it’s notable:

Comey, referring to the exchange with Grassley, told Baier: “That testimony was truthful and I stand by it.” Further, we very recently learned that Comey’s friend who leaked to the Times, Dan Richman, had ‘special government employee’ status at FBI on through February 2017. So Comey’s response that he had not “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source” again, might by true, if only in a very technical sense.

Given that the president was threatening Comey with (apparently nonexistent) secret tapes of his conversations with Comey, and the previous White House was inappropriately pressuring him for political reasons, Comey could have conceivably engendered some sympathy and understanding about leaking to New York Times reporters had he been much more forthright all along.

However, Comey is now employing a self-serving definition of what constitutes a leak that no journalist or citizen thinks is valid, and he’s engaged in legalistic, and ironically enough, Clintonian arguments when asked basic questions about his conduct by Congress.

Republican sources on the Hill don’t seem invested in proving Comey’s testimony or leaks were strictly illegal, and these days are mostly just perplexed by Comey’s behavior. For instance, very soon after his firing as FBI director, Comey declined to be interviewed by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year despite their constitutionally mandated oversight role citing the fact that he was a “private citizen” after his firing. Yet, now he’s been answering all manner of supposedly sensitive questions being posed by members of the press of the while on his very lucrative book tour—and those answers don’t exactly cast Comey in a sympathetic light.

In particular, his inability to explain why he didn’t challenge Lynch or Trump when he implies he felt they were trying to politically influence his investigations amount to little more than a shrug. He also keeps repeatedly noting that Clinton couldn’t be charged for her email scandal because there was no “intent,” when as Baier noted, the question of intent has nothing to do with the relevant statutes. There’s also the matter that high ranking FBI officials working directly under Comey, namely Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, appear to have been engaged in behavior that is very dishonest and unethical, if not illegal.

Investigating both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was an unenviable task for anyone, but that doesn’t let Comey off the hook for answers to basic questions about his conduct that seem woefully inadequate, given the facts.