At the heart of a stinging rebuke leveled Thursday by a Justice Department watchdog against former FBI Director James Comey is “Memo 4,” the G-man’s notes on a meeting in which President Trump purportedly asked him to drop a probe into then-national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The memo, one of seven Comey made of his talks with Trump and others between January and April 2017, was leaked by Comey to The New York Times through a lawyer friend shortly after his ouster from the FBI in May 2017, in what the DOJ’s Inspector General blasted as a stunning breach of protocol.

Comey was invited to a sitdown with Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Oval Office on Valentine’s Day 2017 — one day after Flynn resigned under intense scrutiny of his back-channel talks with Russian operatives.

Once Comey and Trump were alone, the president turned the conversation to Flynn, saying that he “hadn’t done anything wrong,” according to Comey’s recollections.

Trump added that he “hope[d]” Comey could “see [his] way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” according to Memo 4, authored by Comey on his personal laptop in the hours after the meeting.

Deciding for himself that the memos constituted personal documents rather than sensitive FBI intel, Comey kept a copy of Memo 4 in a personal safe at his home unbeknownst to the Bureau, even after he was fired in May 2017.

About a week after his ouster, Comey dusted off Memo 4, snapped photos of the two pages and texted them to his personal lawyer and friend, Daniel Richman, with the instructions that Richman relay their contents to a Times reporter.

That same day, the broadsheet ran an article detailing Comey’s recollection of the Oval Office meeting in exacting detail, down to purported direct quotes from Trump.

The piece dumped fuel on what was then the raging fire of the Russia probe.

Though Memo 4 is not designated as classified, Comey’s dissemination of it and handling of the other six memos drew the fire of DOJ IG Michael Horowitz.

“By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees,” wrote Horowitz in his scathing report.

“Were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director’s example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions, the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly, as Comey himself noted in his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony.”