A close friend of former FBI Director James Comey — who helped reveal Comey’s uncomfortable Oval Office interactions with the president — says the memo he described to The New York Times chronicling the encounter “has never to my knowledge been classified.”
“Jim Comey never gave me a memo that was classified; and the memo whose substance I passed on [to] the Times has never to my knowledge been classified,” Daniel Richman, a longtime adviser to Comey and a Columbia University law professor, told POLITICO.
Richman’s comments are something of a rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s accusation Monday morning that Comey broke the law by leaking classified information to reporters.
“James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media,” Trump said on Twitter. “That is so illegal!”
At issue are a series of memos Comey wrote before Trump fired him on May 9, cataloguing his meetings and phone calls with Trump.
In one of those memos, Comey described what he believed to be pressure from Trump to back off an investigation into Trump ally and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Comey recounted the conversation with Trump — which occurred in the Oval Office in February — during testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in May.
Richman’s comment also comes after a report that indicated some of the details in Comey’s memos appear to have been classified.
But a source with knowledge of the memos said several of them appear to have been “retroactively classified,” and it’s unclear whether any of those details were shared with anyone without a proper clearance.
The source said it was also unclear whether the memos that were retroactively classified included one in which Comey says Trump encouraged him to end the FBI’s investigation into Flynn. That’s the memo that Richman described to the Times and that he says was not classified at the time he shared its contents.
Whether that particular memo has been retroactively classified will be a key question as Comey faces attacks from President Donald Trump and his supporters, who are now accusing him of mishandling classified information.
At least one of Comey’s memos remains unclassified, the source with knowledge told POLITICO.
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NEW: Jim Comey's friend, Dan Richman, says Comey never gave him a classified memo. https://t.co/xuHT25jHHY
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 10, 2017
Some of James Comey's memos were "retroactively classified," a source says https://t.co/R0vrNwb4eN via @abwrig pic.twitter.com/Q8DLWHA4f0
— POLITICO (@politico) July 11, 2017
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