By Lee Cary ——Bio and Archives--June 4, 2023
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On 21 June 2023, Special Council John Durham is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to describe his final report on the FBI’s false claims that former President Donald J. Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 Presidential Election.
Thanks to a video posted on Rumble where James Comey is interviewed by two MSNBC friendly “reporters”, we already know former FBI Director Comey’s perspective on the Durham Report in advance of Durham’s testimony before Congress,
Below is the crux of the MSNBC powderpuff interview by two friends of Comey.
MSNBC Interviewer 1: “As for the Durham Report, three hundred pages, four years, investigating the investigators, one of the things that did come out of it was that procedures, regular FBI procedures, were ignored, that steps were missed along the way in this investigation. In fact, Director Wray said, when the report came out, that, yea, ‘we acknowledged that a couple of years ago and we changed all that. Those changes are already in place.’ Do you acknowledge, perhaps, that some mistakes were made along the way?”
Comey: “Oh definitely, and they were found four years ago by the Inspector General, so there’s nothing new in this new document.
MSNBC Interviewer 1: “And what were some of the mistakes from your point of view?”
Comey: “Oh, that the FBI didn’t communicate clearly the status of certain sources. They didn’t double check certain information before putting it in a court application for a foreign intelligence wiretap. And a bunch of others.”
MSNBC Interviewer #1: “And so, do you believe, now, as some of these politicians call for defunding the FBI, that that has been corrected and that now the procedures are in place have been corrected and are now in place to avoid those kind of mistakes in the future?”
Comey: “I think so, but in complex investigations there’s always going to be mistakes. It doesn’t mean the FBI isn’t competent, honest, and independent.
MSNBC Interviewer #2: “So, Director, with some distance now from your time there with that investigation, and everything that came into that 2016 election, are there things you wish you had done differently?”
Comey: “Oh, plenty. I mean plenty of small things. And, in that main, I think the FBI did it in the right way in a very difficult time in 2016?”
Back in 2019, Comey’s definition of what constitutes “small things” and “the right way” came under scrutiny.
According to an August 29, 2019, NBC News article, the FBI Inspector General stated that the Department of Justice declined to prosecute Comey for violating Bureau policy by leaking memos. First to a friend, then to a national newspaper through that friend, and finally to a lawyer.
Comey got a pass for all of that.
So, is this his example of a “small thing”?
The article read: “The Department of Justice will not prosecute former FBI director James Comey for leaking memos detailing his interactions with President Donald Trump.”
“According (to) an Office of the Inspector General report released Thursday, Comey violated DOJ and FBI policies, as well as the FBI's employment agreement, by keeping copies of four of his memos in a personal safe and asking a law professor friend to make one memo public after Trump fired him in May 2017.”
“‘The responsibility to protect sensitive law enforcement information falls in large part to the employees of the FBI who have access to it through their daily duties,’ Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote in his report.”
There's more:
“‘Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility,’ the report said. ‘By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees — and the many thousands more former FBI employees — who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.’”
“The DOJ's internal watchdog, which probed Comey's handling of the sensitive documents, found that Comey's friend leaked the contents of the memo to a reporter from The New York Times, but that it did not contain classified information. Comey shared all four memos with his private attorneys after his firing without alerting the FBI, the report said — another violation of policy — and one contained information classified at the Confidential level, which is the lowest level.”
Yes, “Classified” is the lowest security level.
But it is a level.
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