[ad_1]
Comey gave a "dangerous example" to FBI employees with the aim of "achieving a desired outcome personally," says the report.
The Office of the Inspector General has referred the findings of its report to the Department of Justice for possible prosecutions earlier this summer, although the Justice Department has refused to file a complaint, according to the report.
CNN previously reported that prosecutors at the Justice Department did not think that there was evidence showing that Comey knew and intended to violate the laws on the treatment of confidential information, according to a person familiar with the referral.
The seven memos, which offer striking examples of Trump's early attempts to disrupt a federal inquiry into his inner circle, have become a catalyst for the investigation of a special advocate when the content of an article was first published in the New York Times. Comey said at a hearing before the Senate in 2017 that he had sent documents to a friend, Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, and had ordered him to share the substance with a reporter. Trump called Comey a "leak" for Comey's shares.
In one of the most consistent memos – the one that Comey asked Richman to detail to a reporter – Comey described a one-on-one meeting that he had with Trump in the Oval Office where the president suggested he conduct the federal investigation on Michael. Flynn, former National Security Advisor.
"I hope you see clearly how you can let go of this, let Flynn go in. It's a good guy … I hope you can let that happen," said Comey, Trump commented, according to a copy of the memo.
"To be clear, it was not a" leak "of classified information, no matter how many times politicians, political experts or the president called it. A citizen can legally share unclassified details of a conversation with the president with the press, or include this information in a book, "wrote Comey in his 2018 memoir.
Lawyers representing Comey were able to review a draft report recently and sent it back to the Inspector General with his comments, a source close to the report said. This review process is usually one of the last steps before the publication of an inspector general's report.
Flynn finally pleaded guilty late 2017 for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador – one of the first charges to have been brought by the Special Advocate's Office Robert Mueller .
Comey said that Richman, a former attorney, provided him with legal advice since his dismissal.
CNN reported last year that the Inspector General's office had also interviewed a number of close associates of Comey outside the FBI with whom he had shared some of the memos, in addition to Richman.
The copies of the memos that were produced in Congress last year contained classification marks indicating that four of them had been designated "secret" or "confidential". The other three memos did not indicate that they contained classified information.
The Office of the Inspector General of the DOJ is about to publish another much-awaited report: this one investigated the origins of the investigation conducted in Russia and the use by the FBI of secret surveillance methods.
CNN reported last month that federal investigators from Inspector General Michael Horowitz's office had conducted more than 100 interviews as part of the review. Its publication is not expected before September at the earliest, after the publication of the Comey report.
The president's allies, including Senator GOP, Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, predicted that the FISA report would be "ugly and damning." Last week, Graham promised to bring Horowitz to his committee so that he publicly testified about the investigation, which the president dubbed "Spygate".
This story begins and will be updated.
[ad_2]
Source link