Like almost everyone who follows politics in the United States, we’ve grown weary of hearing about James Comey’s memos. The public has heard endlessly about these documents—from the media, from the very few politicos who’ve seen them, from Comey himself—but the memoranda themselves remain a mystery.
These documents may prove that President Trump obstructed justice when he asked the FBI director to back off the investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security adviser. Or they may prove the opposite. They may prove that Trump lied repeatedly about his campaign’s connections with Russians. Or they may not.
We first heard about them in May of 2017 when the New York Times—to which Comey had leaked the fact of their existence—reported that the former FBI director had left a “paper trail . . . documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation.”
A month later, we learned that Comey had leaked a portion of the memos to the Times specifically in order to spark the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. In fact Comey had had a friend, a professor of law at Columbia University, leak the documents. He did so, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in June of 2017, “because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it.”
Since then, some Senate Judiciary members and staffers have seen the memos, now in the possession of the FBI, but were not permitted to take notes or make copies of them. A few House members, too, have been allowed to see them, but under similarly guarded circumstances. Various Capitol Hill officials have fired off letters to the FBI demanding to see the memos, but so far to no avail. Only last Friday, GOP congressmen Bob Goodlatte, Devin Nunes, and Trey Gowdy sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein demanding their release to Congress. “There is no legal basis for withholding these materials from Congress,” they concluded.
Now it appears Comey has relied on his memos in his new book, to be released on Tuesday, A Higher Loyalty. He composed the memos, he writes (according to an early review), to document “the nature of the person I was interacting with.”
So the New York Times has seen them, and a few lawmakers and their staffers have seen them, and Comey tantalizes readers of his book with them. But they’re still secret.
Enough.
The FBI should release the Comey memos, with redactions for classified material if necessary, as soon as possible.
Comey created these memoranda, he says, to insure himself against whatever Trump claimed about their meetings. We know what Trump has said about their meetings. Let’s see what Comey said.
This editorial has been updated, calling for the FBI to release the memos rather than Comey himself.
