President retweets Fox and Friends clip about report that several memos written by FBI director on Trump conversations were classified, and calls leaks ‘so illegal’

Donald Trump has accused James Comey, the former director of the FBI, of leaking classified material by passing a memo of their private conversations to the press.

“James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media,” the president tweeted at 6.40am on Monday. “That is so illegal!”

The allegation, the latest phase of Trump’s war on Comey’s credibility, appeared to come in response to a report first published by the Hill which then gained extensive coverage on the conservative Fox News channel.

But Comey’s defenders are likely to object that, even by the Hill’s account, not all the memos he kept were classified, and there is no proof he released one in that category.

Either Trump or Comey is lying. Who might it be? | Lawrence Douglas Read more

Comey told a high-profile congressional hearing last month that he had decided to keep a written record of his dealings with Trump because he thought the president “might lie about the nature of our meeting”.

He explained to the Senate intelligence committee: “I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function.”

He also testified that, following his dismissal, he used a third party to pass to the New York Times the details of conversations with Trump, in the hope of increasing pressure to get a special counsel appointed in the Russia investigation. A special counsel was appointed the day after the resulting Times story.

The Hill reported that Comey wrote seven memos – all considered to be government documents – about his nine conversations with Trump. Four of the memos had markings making clear they contained information classified at the “secret” or “confidential” level, unnamed officials told the website.

It added: “This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticised Hillary Clinton for in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election.”

The Hill article was discussed at length on Fox and Friends, a favourite show of the president’s, who duly retweeted the clip before adding his own comment.

Meanwhile White House counselor Kellyanne Conway seized on the story, describing it as an “incredible bombshell” during an appearance on Fox and Friends.

Conway said: “The boy scout, choir boy defense doesn’t hold up here because if it contains classified information, he is apparently violating, at the very least, what all FBI members sign – they sign a document saying you will not do something like this. He was the director of the entire bureau.

“The irony to me, anyway ... is that this is exactly the problem that Hillary Clinton had with her illegal server – the handling of classified and confidential information that Jim Comey was meant to investigate, if not prosecute.”

But it is far from certain that the memo the former FBI director released into the public domain was among those classified, and some critics detected an attempt to deflect attention from revelations over Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information about Clinton.



During his appearance at the Senate intelligence committee, Comey recalled a conversation about Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and said: “I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership.”

In another exchange, Senator Mark Warner put it to him: “I found it very interesting that in the memo that you wrote after this 14 February pull-aside, you made clear that you wrote that memo in a way that was unclassified. If you affirmatively made the decision to write a memo that was unclassified, was that because you felt at some point the facts of that meeting would have to come clean and come clear, and actually be able to be cleared in a way that could be shared with the American people?”

Comey replied: “Well, I remember thinking, this is a very disturbing development, really important to our work. I need to document it and preserve it in a way, and this committee gets this but sometimes when things are classified, it tangles them up.”

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