The media has largely moved on from the Comey circus when his memos didn't deliver anything useful beyond the Twitter news cycle. But Comey's actions were controversial with good reason. You can't just write up your interactions with the President of the United States while heading the FBI and then pass them on to your friends to hand over to the media.
Or maybe these days, in the age when Hillary Clinton can flagrantly violate the rules on handling classified information and go unpunished, you can. That is to be determined.
More than half of the memos former FBI chief James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.
This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton for in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election.
Comey testified last month he considered the memos to be personal documents and that he shared at least one of them with a Columbia University lawyer friend. He asked that lawyer to leak information from one memo to the news media in hopes of increasing pressure to get a special prosecutor named in the Russia case after Comey was fired as FBI director.
He added, “My view was that the content of those unclassified, memorialization of those conversations was my recollection recorded.”
But when the seven memos Comey wrote regarding his nine conversations with Trump about Russia earlier this year were shown to Congress in recent days, the FBI claimed all were, in fact, deemed to be government documents.
Four of the memos had markings making clear they contained information classified at the “secret” or “confidential” level, according to officials directly familiar with the matter.
In short, Comey broke the law. The question is, will he be held accountable.