Is former FBI Director James Comey headed to prison? More than half of the memos he kept about conversations with President Trump contain classified material. This is according to interviews with individuals that are familiar with the documents.
This makes it very likely that Comey broke the rules of his own agency. Also, he publicly criticized Hillary for ignoring the exact same security protocol in the final days of the 2016 presidential election.
Last month Comey testified with the Senate Intelligence Committee. During the testimony, he mentioned that the notes he took were personal documents. He even admitted that he shared them with at least one friend. He asked the friend to leak information from the note to the media. Comey did this with hopes that it would increase pressure to get a special prosecutor named in the Russia case after Comey was fired as FBI Director.
Per The Hill:
“So you didn’t consider your memo or your sense of that conversation to be a government document?” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) asked Comey on June 8. “You considered it to be, somehow, your own personal document that you could share to the media as you wanted through a friend?”
“Correct,” Comey answered. “I understood this to be my recollection recorded of my conversation with the president. As a private citizen, I thought it important to get it out.”
Comey insisted in his testimony he believed his personal memos were unclassified, though he hinted one or two documents he created might have been contained classified information.
“I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership,” he testified about the one memo he later leaked about former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
He added, “My view was that the content of those unclassified memorialization of those conversations was my recollection recorded.”
The seven notes Comey wrote about his nine conversations with Trump were shown to Congress in recent days. The FBI claimed that all of these notes were deemed to be government documents.
When contacted on Sunday, a spokesman for the FBI declined comment.
Any FBI agent is forbidden from releasing any information regarding ongoing investigations without written permission.
All FBI agents sign an agreement with this information in it:
“Unauthorized disclosure, misuse, or negligent handling of information contained in the files, electronic or paper, of the FBI or which I may acquire as an employee of the FBI could impair national security, place human life in jeopardy, result in the denial of due process, prevent the FBI from effectively discharging its responsibilities, or violate federal law.”
Additionally, the agreement says, “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” and that an agent “will not reveal, by any means, any information or material from or related to FBI files or any other information acquired by virtue of my official employment to any unauthorized recipient without prior official written authorization by the FBI.”
When Comey left the bureau, these documents were still in his possession. Since then he has turned them over to Robert Mueller. Mueller is leading the investigation into the collusion between Russia and Trump during the presidential election.
President Trump weighed in with his thoughts on Twitter. How else?
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884361623514656769
With this breaking news, is Comey headed to prison? Stay tuned as we will keep you updated.
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