Comey in June: My Trump Memos Were Unclassified, Not a ‘Government Document’ :: Grabien News
Description: ‘My view was that the content of those unclassified — the memorialization of those conversations was my recollection recorded’

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Comey in June: My Trump Memos Were Unclassified, Not a ‘Government Document’
‘My view was that the content of those unclassified — the memorialization of those conversations was my recollection recorded’
Jul 9, 2017

News broke Sunday night that more than half of the notes taken by departed FBI director James Comey after his meetings with President Trump contained classified information.

Just last month Comey denied his memos contained classified material.

While testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Trump's firing of Comey, the former director stressed that these memorandums contained no classified information.

The memos, he insisted, were not "government documents" beholden to restrictions on federal records. Instead, he told Sen. Roy Blunt, he was free to share these records with his friends in the media -- which he did.

Here's a transcript from that exchange:

BLUNT: "You said, after you were dismissed, you gave information to a friend so that friend could get that information into the public media."
COMEY: "Correct."
BLUNT: "What kind of information was that? Wasn’t that (ph) — what kind of information did you give to a friend?"
COMEY: "That the — the — the Flynn conversation, that the president asked me to let the — the Flynn — I’m forgetting my exact own words, but the — the conversation in the Oval Office.BLUNT: So you didn’t consider your memo or your sense of that conversation to be a government document? You consider it to be somehow your own personal document that you could share with the media as you wanted to?"
COMEY: "Correct. I..."
BLUNT: "Through a friend?"
COMEY: "... I understood this to be my recollection, recorded, of my conversation with the president. As a private citizen, I felt free to share that. I thought it very important to get it out."
BLUNT: "So were all of your memos that you’ve recorded on classified or other documents memos that might be yours as a private citizen?"
COMEY: "I’m sorry, I’m not following the question."
BLUNT: "Well, I think you said you’d used classified — a classified..."
(CROSSTALK)
COMEY: "Not the classified documents. Unclassified — I don’t have any of them anymore. I gave them to the special counsel. But, yeah, my view was that the content of those unclassified — the memorialization of those conversations was my recollection recorded."

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