Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Experts differ on Comey memo

- MIRIAM VALVERDE Miriam Valverde is a reporter for PolitiFact.com. The Journal Sentinel’s PolitiFact Wisconsin is part of the PolitiFact network.

President Donald Trump questioned whether fired FBI director James Comey broke the law when he had a friend share with the press the content of a memo written during his time at the FBI.

“I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible. Totally illegal? Very ‘cowardly!’ “Trump tweeted Sunday.

Trump’s tweet and Comey’s testimony Thursday spurred a lot of discussion on the Sunday political shows about Comey’s decision to share a memo about a meeting with Trump.

Comey shared the memo after the president had fired him.

Trump, his private lawyer and supporters have called Comey a “leaker” and suggested that what Comey did was illegal.

On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopo­ulos asked Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney who was also fired by Trump, if there was anything illegal about the leaked memo that led to a May 16 New York Times story saying Trump had asked Comey to drop the investigat­ion on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

“So I’m not in the business of making legal pronouncem­ents on what’s legal or what’s criminal anymore. But I will say, it sounds like more of a distractio­n,” Bharara said. “First of all, I think nothing that was in the memo or in the conversati­ons that he had with his friend at Columbia Law School was classified.”

Bharara said Trump’s team also was aware that the memo issue would come up at the hearing, yet did not invoke executive power to prevent Comey from speaking about them.

Trump attorney Jay Sekulow, who appeared later on the show, argued that Comey’s decision was “unpreceden­ted” and that Comey did not give the Trump administra­tion an opportunit­y to determine if they would invoke executive privilege on the memos.

The text of Comey’s memos have not been publicly released. Comey’s written remarks, disclosed a day before his hearing, detail five meetings he had with Trump and why he created memos about the discussion­s.

Comey at the hearing acknowledg­ed that he considered the memo he shared with his friend to be a personal, not government, document. “My view was that the content of those unclassifi­ed — the memorializ­ation of those conversati­ons — was my recollecti­on recorded,” Comey said.

Several law professors told us there are no laws prohibitin­g Comey from sharing conversati­ons he had with Trump in an unclassifi­ed manner.

“It absolutely is legal for Comey to share his own private reflection­s that do not consist of closely held national security secrets with the press, whether by passing on the informatio­n himself or through a friend,” said Heidi Kitrosser, a law professor at the University of Minnesota.

“Anti-leak” laws like the Espionage Act only apply to closely held national security informatio­n, Kitrosser said.

“There is absolutely no basis that I have seen to believe that Comey’s private recollecti­ons fall into that category,” Kitrosser added.

‘Privileged communicat­ions’

Trump’s legal team has argued that conversati­ons between the president and other members of the executive branch are “privileged” and should not be disclosed to the press without authorizat­ion.

Again, legal experts disagreed.

Trump’s private lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, in a news conference after Comey’s hearing said Comey admitted to making “unauthoriz­ed disclosure­s to the press of privileged communicat­ions with the president.”

Executive privilege can be invoked to prevent the compelled disclosure of private executive branch communicat­ions and deliberati­ons in an evidentiar­y proceeding, Jamal Greene, a constituti­onal law professor at Columbia University, told us.

But it does not apply to communicat­ions with the media, he said.

Executive privilege must be explicitly invoked for it to apply in a testimonia­l setting, Greene said.

But based on the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court case, United States vs. Nixon, another branch of government might still be able to insist on disclosure of informatio­n if its interest in disclosure is weightier than the president’s interest in confidenti­ality in the specific material at issue, said Peter M. Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University.

Also, not all private conversati­ons with the president are privileged, as many will concern topics outside of the president’s constituti­onal duties, said Lisa Kern Griffin, a law professor at Duke University School of Law.

Griffin and other experts have pointed out that once the existence and substance of a conversati­on are publicly revealed, the privilege is waived.

Another take: Memos as government property

At least one expert found fault in Comey’s tactics.

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, said Comey’s sharing of the memo with a friend was “unauthoriz­ed and thus unlawful,” because the material was FBI informatio­n covered by federal rules and regulation­s.

Comey was not allowed to treat the memos as personal property, Turley said, given that they were written in the context of a federal investigat­ion, on an FBI computer and revealed to others in the leadership team.

Turley said Comey is unlikely to face criminal charges, but he could be found in violation of profession­al standards.

Diane Marie Amann, a law professor at the University of Georgia, countered that the primary purpose of the Federal Records Act is to preserve important records.

“To share informatio­n in a document, or a printout of a document first prepared on a computer, would not seem to undercut this purpose, given that the document will remain available for preservati­on, in the computer itself and in other printouts,” Amann said.

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