A leak sprung

Anonymous leaking can be a gallant and patriotic act.

Revealing something juicy and important to a newspaper reporter who will publicly reveal it without identifying you—that’s a longtime staple of a free press. It’s vital in making our government accountable when nothing else might.

The best leakers are authoritative and nobly intended. The best journalists know how to establish relationships with these finest of government insiders, also known as sources, who might in certain circumstances leak otherwise unattainable truths about the workings of the people’s government.

These best journalists know whose information can be trusted. They know how to protect sources, who might suffer severe consequences if identified, or who simply might choose never to share their important information if not assured of being left blissfully out of the folderol.

These journalists know how to verify leaked information with additional sources, who almost always are granted anonymity themselves.

“Leave me out of it,” an FBI official might say, “but, yes, the memo from James Comey that you are reading from is something James told me about two months ago.” That’s how it works. It is absurd, not to mention self-contradictory, for President Donald Trump’s private lawyer to declare that fired FBI director Comey had done something wrong or even illegal by arranging for the anonymous leak to the New York Times of his own memoranda about private conversations he’d had with Trump at the White House.

“Comey admitted that he unilaterally and surreptitiously made unauthorized disclosures to the press of privileged communications with the president,” Trump’s lawyer said.

These were Comey’s own memos, written voluntarily by him. They were not classified. Nor are dinner conversations or after-meeting personal confabs with the president privileged.

Trump’s lawyer also accused Comey of making false accusations about the president in those leaked memos. What the lawyer essentially was saying was that Comey had made up lies on the president and leaked privileged truth about him, all in the same memos.

But what made Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday credible and compelling was the broad array of politically transcendent candor.

Comey revealed that President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, had asked him to call the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails a “matter” rather than an investigation. He acknowledged he could have been stronger in responding to Trump when Trump made improper overtures. And, quite from the blue, he said it occurred to him in the middle of the night to get a friend of his, a law professor at Columbia, to leak to the Times portions of memoranda or “notes to file” he’d written about his uncomfortable interactions with Trump.

He gave himself up, and the direct leaker as well.

Comey explained that he did so because Trump had tweeted about audio tapes of those conversations—which apparently don’t exist, and which Comey said he’d be delighted to see released if they existed—and because he thought a special counsel should take over the Russian investigation. He thought news stories based on his memoranda might force the Justice Department to name such a special counsel, which it did.

Here is what appears to have happened: Comey was offended by Trump’s comments after his firing. He believed the president was telling defamatory falsehoods about him. He believed the president had acted improperly in trying to influence him to pull back an FBI investigation. He believed that a credible and independent investigation was needed. And he thought of a tactic that might make that happen.

He didn’t want to call the Times himself and get quoted as making counter-accusations against Trump based on memos he said he’d written. In that case, the story would have been that Comey was personally responding tit-for-tat, not the substance of what the memos described about Trump’s behavior.

He prevailed on an old friend and associate, the Columbia law professor, presumably known to and trusted by the Times or one or more of its reporters, to tip the paper to the existence and substance of those memos.

Comey himself remained unavailable for comment.

That made the story about the memos and the troubling information revealed in them, not that Comey had entered a personal back-and-forth with the president.

The banner headline was powerful. The reaction was wide, deep and strong.

Now we indeed have the fully respected Robert Mueller as special counsel investigating the entire Russian affair in a way the American people can reasonably expect to be thorough, objective and credible.

We await a report we can believe— about Trump, about Michael Flynn and about Russian interference in our election.

What Comey did was sly, crafty, manipulative, self-serving, gallant, patriotic and even heroic.

He doesn’t need to be investigated. He needs to get an award, maybe a Presidential Medal of Freedom, maybe placed around his neck by Mike Pence.

Or one other possibility: A James Comey-Angus King independent ticket for the presidency in 2020.