Thinking about the Comey Memos
His leaking, at the very least, was improper.
By Andrew C. McCarthy — June 12, 2017
The commentary about James Comey’s memoranda has been all over the map. The former FBI director says he made memos contemporaneous to, or immediately after, all nine of the meetings or phone calls he recalls having had with Donald Trump, when the latter was president-elect and, later, president. Comey acknowledges that he orchestrated the leak of at least one memo — or rather, a snippet mined from its contents — to the New York Times. All of the memos, he testified, have now been surrendered to the special counsel, Robert Mueller.
George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley does a good job in The Hill outlining much of the relevant law. One major issue is whether these documents belonged to Comey, in the sense of being his property rather than the government’s. That is the position he took in his testimony. Like Turley, I think the former director is wrong.
As a longtime prosecutor, I have a black-and-white test for this sort of thing: Would a judge in a criminal trial consider the documents to be government property for purposes of federal discovery law?
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/448529/print
