The following article by Katie Bo Williams was posted on the Hill website April 20, 2018:
The public release of seven memos written by former FBI Director James Comey documenting his interactions with President Trump has divided Washington down political lines.
The president swiftly tweeted that the fifteen partially-redacted pages show Comey leaked classified information. Some of his supporters have called for prosecution.
But outside of Trump’s core allies, the verdict is less certain.
Even some Republicans on Capitol Hill have privately acknowledged that the release of the memo might have been an unforced error, thrusting scrutiny back onto Trump’s alleged interactions with Russian prostitutes and off of Comey himself. Up until Thursday, the former director had been taking some heat for the personal shots he takes at the president’s appearance in his new book, which was released on Tuesday.
“I think there have been persuasive analyses done on both sides,” said GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak. “All that matters is, does the release of the memo affect [special counsel Robert Mueller’s] inquiry?”
Democrats have speculated that the three House GOP chairmen who forced the release of the memos to Capitol Hill — Reps. Bob Goodlatte(Va.), Trey Gowdy (S.C.) and Devin Nunes (Calif.) — are trying to set a predicate on which the president can fire either Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or Mueller himself. Trump has repeatedly characterized the probe into his campaign’s alleged ties to Russia a “witch hunt” launched by his political enemies.
Allies of the president have been swift to say that the memos expose Comey as a leaker who was “blind” to biases with the FBI.
But much of the media attention has been concentrated on some of the more salacious details about Trump in Comey’s meticulously detailed notes.
In one, Comey says Trump told him that Russian President Vladimir Putin bragged that Russia has “some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.”
In another, he says that the president told him that he had “serious reservations” about then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s judgment. According to the memos, Flynn failed to inform Trump that a redacted foreign leader was the first to call him to congratulate him on his election victory — until he was in the midst of a lunch with British Prime Minister Theresa May and thanked her for being the first.
That foreign leader was Putin, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Much of the contents of Comey’s memos had already been made public by the time they leaked to the press Thursday night — either through Comey’s own testimony, public press accounts or his tell-all book — and close watchers of the former director’s feud with Trump were swift to dismiss characterizations of the report as a bombshell.
“If nothing else, all the excited tweets are definitely making it clear how few of you read Comey’s book,” tweeted a spokesman for Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has probed Trump’s dismissal of Comey last spring.
It is far from clear that Comey disclosed classified information when he shared four of his seven memos with a personal friend, with the intention that the friend would reveal some of the contents to the press.
All seven memos were made public, with some redactions, but it is not self-evident from their release if Comey shared any of the blacked-out information with his friend.
According to the Journal, of the four memos he shared, two contained information now considered by the government to be classified. Of those two, according to the Journal, Comey redacted the classified elements of the one that at the time was considered classified before providing the document to his friend.
The second memo was not considered classified at the time, but FBI officials have since upgraded it to “confidential” since his departure, according to the Journal.
The Justice Department inspector general is investigating the matter, the paper reports.
The release of the memos to Congress came under threat of subpoena from Goodlatte, who, along with Gowdy and Nunes, has been investigating alleged bias and potential wrongdoing at the Justice Department during the 2016 election.
Democrats have described the GOP investigations as a partisan exercise designed to undercut Mueller.
This spring, Nunes forced the release of a classified memo his staff drafted alleging that the Obama-era Justice Department abused powerful surveillance authorities in order to obtain a politically-motivated warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
That document, wildly hyped in the run-up to its release, has largely faded from the political landscape since.
Some onlookers speculate that the Comey memos could meet the same fate — an entrenched part of doctrine on one side and dismissed as partisan conspiracy theories on the other.
“Seems like a little bit of a wash to me,” Mackowiak said. “It’s hard to tell right now whether this ultimately matters or not.”
“What matters is, what does the Mueller inquiry have?”