WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors in Washington are investigating a years-old leak of classified information about a Russian intelligence document, and they appear to be focusing on whether former FBI Director James Comey illegally provided details to reporters, according to people familiar with the
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors in Washington are investigating a years-old leak of classified information about a Russian intelligence document, and they appear to be focusing on whether former FBI Director James Comey illegally provided details to reporters, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
The document played a key role in Comey’s decision to sideline the Justice Department and announce in July 2016 that the FBI would not recommend that Hillary Clinton face charges in her use of a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state. Previously, federal prosecutors in New York scrutinized Comey after his personal lawyer and friend, Daniel C. Richman, provided the contents of a memo about Comey’s interactions with Trump to a Times reporter at Comey’s request. That memo contained no classified information, officials later determined. Though officials retroactively determined that other memos that Comey wrote contained classified information, prosecutors declined to charge Comey with illegally disclosing the material.
Whether the document was fake remains an open question. But U.S. officials at the time did not believe that Lynch would hinder the Clinton email investigation, and neither Wasserman Schultz nor Benardo had any inside information about it. Still, if the Russians had released the information after the inquiry was closed, it could have tainted the outcome, hurt public confidence in the Justice Department and sowed discord.
Multiple news stories about the classified disclosures also make it harder to determine whether one person was speaking to reporters or several people, according to former law enforcement officials. And the larger the universe of government officials who have been briefed on classified information, the more difficult it is to find the leaker, former officials said. In this case, lawmakers were briefed on the Russian document in addition to executive branch officials.
Still, if a government agency is determined to hunt down the source of a leak, as the CIA was in the case of Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former CIA officer who was convicted of leaking details about an anti-Iran operation to a Times reporter, Justice Department officials generally will pursue the case aggressively.
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