Trump Lawyer Threatens To Report A Former FBI Employee To The Inspector General

Politics

from the IT-GOES-ALL-THE-WAY-TO-THE-TOP dept

President Trump served up plenty of responses to former FBI director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate. Some he served up himself, like his contradictory claim Comey was lying about everything, but somehow vindicating Trump at the same time. Some were served up by his legal representation, which weren’t much better despite being composed by an actual lawyer and not being limited to 140 characters.

The most extraordinary thing to come out of the hearing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held Thursday may not be former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony, but the baffling, typo-riddled response to that testimony issued by Donald Trump’s personal attorney Marc Kasowitz.

Perhaps the most irresponsible aspect of Kasowitz’s press release was the suggestion that Comey might have violated the law by relaying his account of unclassified conversations with Trump to the press, via a friend. As a veritable chorus of legal scholars, including our own Steve Vladeck, have already observed, this is arrant nonsense. Indeed, it is so clearly false that it’s hard to see how a minimally competent attorney could have made it in good faith——though it will doubtless make perfectly serviceable chum for the cable news shows.

This only scratches the surface, however. The whole document is so remarkable for both its sloppiness and disingenuousness that it’s worth going through paragraph by paragraph.

…Which Julian Sanchez then does. I wholeheartedly encourage you to click through and read the entire evisceration, which shows Trump’s lawyer denying claims Comey never made and conflating private conversations with classified documents.

That leads to another one of Trump’s lawyer’s more ridiculous assertions. It wasn’t covered directly in the press release, but apparently Trump (and his lawyer) believe they can somehow punish someone Trump has already fired.

President Donald Trump’s outside counsel will file a leak complaint regarding former FBI Director James Comey’s leaked memos with the Department of Justice, a source close to the outside legal team tells NBC News.

Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz will file the complaint with the DOJ’s Inspector General and the Senate Judiciary Committee after Comey testified Thursday that he allowed a personal friend to leak an unclassified memo of his conversations with the president to news outlets in hopes it would trigger the appointment of a special counsel.

Cue the laughter. If Kasowitz wanted this threat to have any weight, he probably should have pulled the trigger before Trump fired Comey. At best, an investigation might make it harder for Comey to return to the FBI, something I doubt Comey has any interest in doing.

Furthermore, the underlying conceit — that’s there’s anything to file a formal complaint about — is severely flawed.

“Any complaint on what Jim testified yesterday, in my opinion, would be frivolous for the following reason,” said [Lawfare Editor Benjamin] Wittes in an interview with Yahoo News Deputy Editor Daniel Klaidman. “First of all, Comey was very clear that the memo that he wrote was intentionally written in unclassified form so that it would not be bound up in classification rules. So if the claim is that he’s admitted to leaking classified information, that’s simply factually false.”

[…]

“The real issue is whether the president has a reasonable expectation of confidentiality when he fires somebody and then lies about the circumstances in which he did that, and that strikes me as a matter in which to ask that question is also to answer it,” said Wittes. “The proper answer to Mr. Kasowitz’s complaint is laughter.”

As any law enforcement official can tell you, privacy expectations in shared conversations only stretch as far as the other participants are willing to take them. Even in an executive branch setting, an informal conversation does not instantly become classified or top secret or whatever it is the president wishes it was the moment it ends.

There also is no leak. Comey’s personal memorializations of conversations with someone unrelated to an ongoing investigation are not the sort of thing that can be leaked — at least not in the context being used by Trump’s lawyer. Comey can hand out copies of these memos to whoever he wants, because they’re his recollections, not FBI investigative documents.

If Trump is seeking someone to blame for Comey’s actions, he has no one to blame but himself. It’s become apparent Comey was fired for not pledging his allegiance to Trump, rather than for any genuine misdeeds related to his job as FBI director. Once Trump unceremoniously shitcanned Comey, any hope Comey might keep his conversational memos secret was lost forever. These statements by Trump’s lawyer are legal grandstanding. There’s nothing in them of substance. But there doesn’t have to be. The assertions appeal to Trump’s base, and to President Trump, that’s all that really matters.

Filed Under: doj, donald trump, fbi, inspector general, james comey, leaks, mark kasowitz