President Donald Trump early Monday accused former FBI Director James Comey of breaking the law by leaking classified information to the media.
In a tweet posted at 6:40 a.m., Trump said:
Trump's tweet came after he retweeted a Fox News item about an article in The Hill claiming that Comey's private memos about his meetings with Trump, which he gave to an intermediary to leak to the press, contained classified information.
During his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, Comey admitted asking a friend from Columbia Law School to leak information from one of his memos to The New York Times in hopes of spurring a special counsel to investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during last year's election.
Four of the seven memos Comey kept of his conversations with Trump were marked "secret" or "confidential," the report noted.
Comey, though, testified that he considered the memos to be his own personal property, not that of the government.
"So, you didn't consider your memo or your sense of that conversation to be a government document?" Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., had asked Comey during the June 8 testimony. "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."
However, he also hinted his memos could have contained classified information, but that he "immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation."
According to FBI policy, agents are prohibited from releasing classified material or information regarding ongoing agency investigations without written permission, and documents created as part of official duties are considered government property.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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