We have somewhat of a response from the Comey camp over the accusation made by Trump’s lawyer that he improperly turned over the information from his memos to the media.
It’s Benjamin Wittes, the guy who has been telling the media a lot of what Comey thinks:
Kasowitz’s complaint, he said, only warrants “laughter,” Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a Brookings Institution senior fellow, told Yahoo News.
“Any complaint on what Jim testified yesterday, in my opinion, would be frivolous,” Wittes said. “First of all, Comey was very clear that the memo that he wrote was intentionally written in unclassified form so that it would not be bound up in classification rules. So if the claim is that he’s admitted to leaking classified information, that’s simply factually false.”
I’ve been hearing a lot about this on social media, and boy, do they sound like they caught Comey red handed.
However, in the original post about Kasowitz’s complaint, it sounds like the punishment for this, even if he was guilty, is a nastily worded post-it note in Comey’s FBI file:
The Justice Department, however, has limited jurisdiction over former employees. They can investigate but the remedy in the event of finding wrongdoing would be to make a note in Comey’s file should he ever seek to be employed by the DOJ again.
So, I dunno, is this much ado about nothing?
It kinda seems like it comes down to whether he was actually able to write the memos in such a way that they were not classified, and not legally property of the FBI.
Here’s a discussion about the matter on CBS:
President on James Comey: 'WOW, Comey Is A Leaker!' But former FBI Chief testified he was just sharing his recollection as a private citizen pic.twitter.com/ZmXXX64SYi
— Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) June 9, 2017
Now if you listen to the hysterical Sean Hannity and his Trump accomplice Jay Sekulow, Comey is the worst traitor to have ever traitored and the king of traitorland in the treacherous states of traitormerica.
They also say that Comey committed a felony by not reporting immediately when he thought that Trump was committing obstruction of justice. But this has been obliterated by none other than Alan Dershowitz, and other lawyers, who say that it simply doesn’t meet the standard of the law that they’re citing. It’s called “misprision of a felony” and the Business Insider ran it down here pretty well.
Throw in the long history of Trump threatening to sue for publicity and then forgetting about it and I think you got a classic case of a nada-taco here. That’s Spanish for a nothing-burger. Mmm. Tacos.