President Trump suggested in a tweet that former FBI Director James Comey illegally leaked classified documents to the media, and added that the Comey's actions triggered the appointment of a special counsel .
“James Comey illegally leaked classified documents to the press in order to generate a Special Council?” the president said late Friday. “Therefore, the Special Council was established based on an illegal act? Really, does everybody know what that means?”
At least two of the memos Comey handed over to a friend outside of the government had information that officials now consider classified, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. The leak prompted a review by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog.
Comey redacted one memo’s elements that he knew to be classified to protect secrets before giving the documents to the friend. He determined that another memo didn’t have any classified information. However, after he left the FBI, bureau officials upgraded it to “confidential,” the lowest level of classification.
The Justice Department inspector general is now conducting an investigation into classification issues related to the Comey memos, people familiar with the matter told CNN. Comey said he considered the memos personal rather than government documents. He told Congress that he wrote them and authorized their release to the media “as a private citizen.”
“My judgment was, I need to get that out into the public square,” Comey told Congress last year. “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons. I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”
The memos were the basis for Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, when he accused the president of trying to shut down an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The president has denied trying to thwart the probe.
Comey’s tactics were successful — special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed shortly after Trump fired Comey as FBI director last year.
Trump has repeatedly accused Comey of mishandling classified documents to discredit the former FBI director. The public dispute between the two men heated up this week as Comey granted several interviews to promote a memoir that lambastes the president.
Trump continued on Tuesday in his assertion that Comey's leaked documents were indeed classified:
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