Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Wednesday that fired FBI Director James Comey broke FBI agency protocol by giving memos to a friend to then have leaked to the press.
Washington Examiner reports:
“As a general proposition, you have to understand the Department of Justice. We take confidentiality seriously, so when we have memoranda about our ongoing matters, we have an obligation to keep that confidential,” Rosenstein said on Fox News after being asked if it would ever be proper for an FBI director to take notes on a meeting with the president and then leak them to the press.
“I think it is quite clear,” he added when asked if he would approve of Comey’s leak. “It’s what we were taught, all of us prosecutors and agents.”
As TGP previously reported, more than half of the memos fired FBI Director James Comey wrote during his private conversations with President Trump have been determined to contain classified information.
FBI policy forbids any agent from releasing classified information or any information from ongoing investigations. All records created by agents during official duties are also considered to be government property.
The Hill reports:
More than half of the memos former FBI chief James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.
This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton for in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election.
Comey insisted in his testimony he believed his personal memos were unclassified, though he hinted one or two documents he created might have been contained classified information.
But when the seven memos Comey wrote regarding his nine conversations with Trump about Russia earlier this year were shown to Congress in recent days, the FBI claimed all were, in fact, deemed to be government documents.
Four of the memos had markings making clear they contained information classified at the “secret” or “confidential” level, according to officials directly familiar with the matter.
