For those of you who might be interested in getting into the weeds on the Comey indictment, this X- thread by MSNBC’s Mike Levine says that the case is not what everyone says it is. Not that it’s any stronger, mind you. It’s just a different set of facts than what everyone assumed:
The Justice Department is still offering few details about their case against former FBI director James Comey, but @ABC News has learned that Count 1 of the indictment, charging Comey with making false statements, focuses on his alleged role in having his close friend and former personal lawyer, Daniel Richman, provide information to reporters about an FBI investigation connected to Hillary Clinton
In the indictment, Count 1 says that Comey “willfully and knowingly” lied when, testifying under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020, he reaffirmed previous Senate testimony insisting he never “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” about an investigation connected to someone only identified as “PERSON 1.”
“That statement was false, because, as JAMES B. COMEY JR. then and there knew, he in fact had authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding [the] FBI investigation,” the indictment reads.
Sources tell ABC News that “PERSON 1” is Clinton and “PERSON 3” is Richman.
(w/ @KFaulders @alex_mallin)
Though Richman was a close personal friend of Comey’s, he also served as an unpaid “Special Government Employee” during Comey’s last two years at the FBI, according to publicly-available FBI and Justice Department documents. Richman’s work with the FBI largely focused on promoting lawful access to encrypted phones, and — as Comey himself later told federal investigators — Richman was “on-site at the FBI a lot” during that time.
While we still don’t know the exact matter involving Richman that is the focus of Count 1, the House Judiciary Committee has released a trove of FBI documents from a series of leak investigations launched in 2017 that shed more light on Richman’s role as Comey’s alleged “liaison to the media.”
According to the documents, one of the leak investigations centered around a New York Times article on April 22, 2017, headlined “Comey Tried to Shield the FBI from Politics. Then He Shaped an Election.” The article reported that one of the reasons Comey decided to publicly announce his recommendation against charging Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server involved a “Russian document” that could have been used to question Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s impartiality. Some of the information in the article was allegedly classified, and as part of the subsequent leak investigation, the FBI interviewed Richman, the documents show.
The newly-released FBI documents say that while “Comey instructed the FBI to hire Richman as a Special Government Employee” — with “a Top Secret clearance” — to work on “Going Dark” matters, “Comey also used Richman as a liaison to the media.”
“Richman contacted journalists to correct stories critical of Comey, the FBI and to shape future press coverage,” the FBI said in a September 2021 report on its investigation. “Richman did this both when he was an SGE and after he resigned from the FBI.”
Richman, however, told the FBI during its investigation that Comey never asked him to talk to the media, according to the documents.
The newly-released documents, which are heavily redacted at some points, suggest that in at least one instance, Richman spoke with a reporter about sensitive information.
The documents say that in a meeting in his office January 2017, Comey privately told Richman that one of the many reasons he decided to make a public statement about the Clinton email investigation was the classified information that could potentially undermine Lynch’s credibility. As Richman himself recalled to the FBI, shortly after his meeting with Comey, Richman spoke to one of the New York Times reporters who later published the April 22, 2017, article and discussed the classified information with the reporter, though “Richman claimed [the reporter] brought up the Classified Information and knew more about it than he did,” the newly-released documents recount.
Nevertheless, after more than four years of investigation, the FBI stated in its report at the time, “The investigation has not yielded sufficient evidence to criminally charge any person, including Comey or Richman, with making false statements or with the substantive offenses under investigation.”
Stephen Miller says that Comey staged an attempted coup and that’s why he’s being prosecuted. If that prosecution is based on these facts, it would seem he’s being prosecuted for a coup against Hillary Clinton.