New Report: Comey Lied to Senators and Leaked as FBI Director!

New Report: Comey Lied to Senators and Leaked as FBI Director!

June 24, 2017

2:00 pm

Noah

663Views

Double whammy!

Things are going very badly for James Comey and I continue to believe it will end in jail time.

New evidence has come out that Comey lied to Senators in his May 3 testimony to Congress and also that he leaked confidential information while he was FBI Director. Two big no-nos.

Here is the new report, from Breitbart:

James Comey may have misled senators on May 3, when he testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had never been an anonymous source in news reports related to the Russia investigation.
By that time, he had already leaked several private conversations he had with President Trump to his friend Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of the blog Lawfare and former editorial writer for the Washington Post.

Wittes wrote in a piece on May 18, only nine days after Comey was fired, that the former FBI director had shared those conversations “over the previous few months.” He wrote:

Comey never told me the details of the dinner meeting; I don’t think I even knew that there had been a meeting over dinner until I learned it from the Times story. But he did tell me in general terms that early on, Trump had ‘asked for loyalty’ and that Comey had promised him only honesty. He also told me that Trump was perceptibly uncomfortable with this answer.
Wittes also wrote that he had lunch with Comey on March 27 and that they discussed a phone call that Trump had made to him earlier in the day.

Wittes denied those conversations were leaks but were “just conversations between friends, the contents of which one friend is now disclosing.”

However, a leak is the release of unauthorized information, according to a definition by George Washington University professor and legal scholar Jonathan Turley. There is no condition that the information has to be published or distributed via physical memo.

And Wittes is arguably a member of the news media. In January, Wittes published a pieceon Comey in Lawfare, and he writes and publishes pieces regularly.

It would not have been unreasonable for Comey to think Wittes could publish a piece on their conversations in the future — which is exactly what happened.

Wittes not only wrote about the “loyalty” conversation with Trump in his May 18 blog post titled “What James Comey Told Me About Donald Trump,” but he wrote about contacting the New York Times as a source to share what Comey had told him. In a BuzzFeed interview, he also discussed contacting the New York Times.

The fact that Wittes did so only after Comey was fired does not change the fact that Comey shared his communications with Trump while he was still FBI director.

Comey’s leaking while still FBI director appears to have extended beyond Wittes.

Comey told senators on June 8 that he decided on May 12 to release his memos of his conversations with Trump to friend Daniel Richman so that he could leak them to the media to prompt a special counsel.

But that does not explain who leaked to the New York Times the conversation about the “loyalty request” on May 11 — a day before Comey said he gave Richman memos of the conversation to leak to media outlets.

That Times story cited “associates,” or “two people who have heard” Comey’s account of the dinner and agreed to keep it quiet while Comey was director.

The Associated Press reported that a day before the New York Times story broke, Comey friend Richman had commented to the AP that the president had removed “somebody unwilling to pledge absolute loyalty to him.”

From those reports, it appears that Comey told both Wittes and Richman about the conversations while he was FBI director, potentially for the purpose of later leaking to the media.

Despite the leaking, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3, six days before he was fired, that he had “never” been an anonymous news source on “matters relating to” the investigation on the Trump campaign.