But the dishonesty at work may have been even more deeply embedded. Felten also examines several internal inconsistencies in Comey’s classification notations, which were never reviewed by an independent official and of course Hennessey hadn’t seen at the time of her excessive vindications of Comey’s disclosures.
Feltin notes, for example, that after labeling a series of his memos SECRET or CONFIDENTIAL, Comey inexplicably switched to UNCLASSIFIED//NOFORN for the very meeting at which Trump allegedly expressed his hope that Comey could see his way to letting the Flynn matter go. Comey and the commentariat made much of this alleged “criminal” request when Comey publicized it. But in his June testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey admitted he wrote the document to be “accessible” in order to share it with the American public.
In other words, although Comey today maintains he released the memos as a private citizen , he admitted to strategizing how to leak the presidential conversations long before his firing, and indeed, was plotting to do it at the very same time he was assuring the president he was trying to stop the leaking.
This is not the first time, either, that the notion has cropped up that Comey anticipatorily structured his actions, as well as his writings, to frame Trump, at least with his enemies, while sanitizing his own role in the frame-up. Let’s go back to Hennessey’s above-cited piece from June 9, 2017.
There she claims Comey didn’t have to use an intermediary to make public the contents of the Flynn memo. He could have done it by hinting to close associates their indiscretion with the press would be welcome. That he didn’t do this (he is, after all, no “weasel,”) but took responsibility because he “believed the information needed to get to the public expeditiously” made him, in her view, a model whistleblower.
This construction of what Comey might have done ignores Comey’s cherished role as drama queen in the entire affair, to say nothing of the fact that, as Turley underscores, if he was so concerned, he could simply have passed copies of the memos to Congress. Additionally, had he lost control over the information’s dissemination by leaking it anonymously rather than through his friend, the memos wouldn’t have been eligible for Exemption 7(A) under the Freedom of Information Act statute . They would’ve been considered already in the public realm, and Comey and the Left would not have been able to use the aura of documents no one in the media had ever seen while immunizing themselves against rebuttal.
The Jury Is Still Out on 18 U.S.C. § 641
One reason Comey and his allies are putting so much emphasis on the memos being Comey’s personal property is the above-cited conversion statute. This law imposes criminal penalties on anyone who “steals, purloins or knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States of any department or agency thereof. . . .”
Later language sweeps in any “property made .. . under contract for the United States or any department thereof.” You see the point. As Turley identified last June, if the memos were government documents, which we now know they indisputably are, they would fall within the purview of this criminal law.
This application was at once shot down by Steve Vladeck in the Washington Post . He first acknowledged there is an “open question” in the Fourth Circuit as to whether “pure information” rather than tangible property might be considered “property” for these purposes. The case he cites, however, U.S. v. Morison , was decided in 1988. The understanding of intangible property such as information and how it becomes monetized has advanced immeasurably in the courts since then, to keep pace with the rise of intellectual property as well as its ubiquity as a source of economic value.
Then Vladeck baselessly asserted “the crux of the issue here is the content of the memo, not the physical memo itself” (emphasis in the original). Clearly, however, from the first disclosure in the New York Times , it was the mystique of the memos themselves, the physical objects, that garnered attention and elevated Comey’s hearsay claims. Until last week, it was the phantom memos, not the information Comey spun off them, that gave false heft to the Left’s obstruction narrative.
As I’ve written before , moreover, this difference between secondhand information and the memos themselves, the memos that were government documents that Comey removed and disclosed without permission, was expressly affirmed this year by a DC district court judge. Now that the memos have been made public, the Left’s dismissal of the statutory basis for conversion has become untenable. Not coincidentally, the monetary value of the memos, which Vladeck also denied, has become perfectly obvious with the publication of Comey’s tell-all and the publicity surrounding it and the role of the memos as props in Comey’s histrionic disclosures.
It is for this reason that leftist legal academics are punching up the panegyrics for Comey The Whistleblower, implying Comey had an unselfish excuse for flouting rules and norms. But as the Morison court stated, “To use the first amendment for such a purpose would be to convert the first amendment into a warrant for thievery.”
"Now that the memos have been perused, the theories of a number of legal commentators have unsurprisingly proved to be full of errors, irrelevancies, and overstatements."
Perhaps the time to stop playing chicken little is now, I for one am overly anxious for the Mueller team to lay the cards out, but I do understand the simple fact that the more rocks overturned the more the exposed critters run away from the light leaving trails to follow. All the supposed experts have been wrong on so many counts and the end of the investigation is where we will get actual answers. If trump is deemed innocent the left will cry foul and if he is indicted the right will scream deep state conspiracy. I have to accept that our system is not perfect but as close as human nature allows. Personally I believe the James Comey is a boy scout and I have yet to see anything irrefutable at this point to change my mind, the evidence also shows that Donald Trump would lie about the time of day for no reason at all and based on that nothing he says is accepted as fact. There in is the danger to be caught lying, you are forever disbelieved.
You seem to be a little bit biased in that assessment and you started out looking like a moderate. We know about Trump and his flaws, but do you deny that Comey lied under oath to Congress?
Just a sample of Comey's lies:
“In his statements before Congress, Director Comey repeatedly assured us that the FBI investigated whether charges of obstruction of justice and intentional destruction of records were merited,” the chairmen of three House committees and a Senate committee complained last week in a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “The facts of this investigation call those assertions into question.”
Congress has now obtained letters detailing unprecedented immunity agreements and side deals with multiple witnesses in the case — including one in which Comey agreed to prevent his investigators from reviewing any emails from Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills to Clinton’s server administrator Paul Combetta generated in late 2014 and early 2015. The off-limits correspondence, the chairmen point out, could reveal information “directing the destruction or concealment of federal records.”
Astonishingly, before Comey agreed to the June side deal with Mills’ attorney, he “already knew of the conference calls between Secretary Clinton’s attorneys and Mr. Combetta, his use of BleachBit, and the resulting deletions, further casting doubt on why the FBI would enter into such a limited evidentiary scope of review.”
In other words, Comey never really investigated Clinton and her aides for obstruction of justice, as he claimed. Lacking access to key evidence, he couldn’t have explored the possibility, though the circumstances were beyond suspicious.
“The sequence of events leading up to the destruction of Secretary Clinton’s emails — the conference call, the work ticket, the use of BleachBit, and [Combetta’s] subsequent refusal to discuss the conference call with the FBI — raises questions about whether Secretary Clinton, acting through her attorneys [including Mills], instructed [Combetta] to destroy records relevant to the then-ongoing congressional investigations,” noted House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz.
In his July testimony, Comey said it was unclear if anyone had helped Clinton’s lawyers delete emails — yet he had to have known that Combetta, in his final interview under his immunity deal, had admitted destroying evidence under subpoena.
Comey also swore his team asked Clinton if she knew her lawyers had wiped clean the devices containing her email archives, when it seems clear from the summary of her interview that agents did not ask her that question.
“Did you ask that question?” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked.
“Yes,” Comey replied.
In 4½ hours of testimony, Comey never once mentioned that he’d agreed to give Mills, Combetta and three other key subjects of his investigation immunity from prosecution. Also belying his pronouncements of “transparency,” he failed to reveal the unusual side deals that severely limited the scope of his probe.
Congressional investigators only learned about the deals weeks later, and still have not obtained all of the documents.
Lynch and Comey have redacted parts of the side-deal letters, including the names of all Justice Department and FBI personnel. They have also restricted access to the letters to certain members of Congress, while prohibiting even those members from removing them from the secure viewing room where they are kept. They’re also barred from taking notes.
“These onerous restrictions are not consistent with the high degree of transparency you and director Comey promised to Congress,” the chairmen complained.
Though Comey has turned over some 250 pages of investigative-case summaries and witness-interview summaries known as FBI 302s, he’s still withholding summaries of interviews with some 30 other witnesses.
It’s more evidence that Comey hasn’t been straight with the public about this probe, and raises serious questions about his integrity."
He also said that he didn't make a decision on the Clinton case until AFTER Hillary Clinton was interviewed - That was a whopper of a lie!
When 'an administration' calls the bet on a desperate 'grab arse', that administration is covering the wrong arse.