Pressure to Release Comey Memos May Have Backfired on GOP

WASHINGTON — For days, top Republicans in Congress demanded the release of James B. Comey’s memos about President Donald Trump, threatening Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, with a subpoena if he failed to share the highly anticipated documents written by the former FBI director.

But if Trump and his allies believed that Rosenstein’s refusal would deliver a pretext to call for his firing, as Democrats asserted, his decision to quickly release all the memos late Thursday night foiled that plan. The memos leaked to reporters hours after being delivered to lawmakers in both parties.

And the seven memos, in which Comey methodically documented his interactions with the president in real time, did little to help Republicans undermine Comey’s credibility or expose contradictions with his best-selling, tell-all book. Taken together, the 15 pages of detailed notes largely back up the stories that Comey told in congressional testimony, in the pages of his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” and during numerous television and radio interviews.

“I’m not quite sure how this improved the strategic posture of those who want to dismantle the special counsel investigation,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “This is a tactic that has backfired. From what I’ve seen of the Comey memos, they bear out completely the authenticity of his reports and his own credibility.”

Word last spring that Comey had taken contemporaneous notes of his meetings with Trump jolted Washington, and for nearly a year, the existence of the still-secret memos cast a shadow over the capital, generating intense speculation about the private details that might be exposed if they were made public. Salacious talk of Russian prostitutes, a request to ease up on the investigation of the president’s national security adviser and a presidential demand for the loyalty of the FBI director all made for bombshell revelations.

But by the time the actual memos appeared, the details were already known and some Republicans suggested the real import of the memos was that they indicated that there was no obstruction of justice case.

“I don’t know that it was necessarily earth-shattering, the new information that we found,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C. "But if someone is trying to suggest an obstruction of justice case, I would use the memos as one of the exhibits to use in the defense. It didn’t sound like Director Comey was intimidated.”

Members of both parties said Friday that Comey’s notes mostly repeat his public testimony and are unlikely to drastically change the trajectory of Trump’s presidency or alter the investigations swirling around him.

The release of the memos showed that Comey’s recent public statements have barely strayed from the recollections that he put on paper during the months before he was fired by Trump last May. The memos document how the president sought loyalty from Comey; asked him to “let go” of the investigation into Michael T. Flynn, his national security adviser; and pressed Comey to publicly clear him in the Russia inquiry.

In addition, the memos provide more evidence of what Comey saw as the president’s obsession with the allegations of indecent behavior. Comey wrote in the memos — as he did in his book — that Trump repeatedly brought up a supposed encounter with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013.

Democrats said the memos helped establish that Comey was not a disgruntled employee who made up stories about the president.

“Thanks @HouseGOP for urging release of the Comey memos!” Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., wrote on Twitter.

Some Republicans continued to assail Comey, casting doubt on his judgment and suggesting that he had been motivated by resentment over his firing.

In a statement about the memos, the three Republican committee chairmen who had pressed for their release wrote that Comey never explicitly said in his memos that the president was trying to interfere in the Russia investigation.

“While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation,” they wrote.

Trump wrote in a tweet that the memos “show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION.”

Some of the president’s most ardent Republican supporters acknowledged that the previously unreported details in the memos were not likely to emerge as important evidence to counter the narrative that Comey is offering publicly during his weekslong book tour.

Meadows and other Republican lawmakers seized on the memos, which were lightly redacted by the Justice Department before they were released, as proof that Comey had leaked classified information when he gave copies of some to a friend, with permission to read them to a reporter from The New York Times.

The Justice Department’s inspector general is conducting a review of the handling of classified information contained in Comey’s memos, according to a person briefed on the investigation. The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is expected to dedicate a section of a larger report about the FBI’s decision-making in 2016 to the matter of Comey’s documents. Comey gave copies of at least two of his memos to Daniel C. Richman, a longtime associate outside the FBI. Some of the memos were later deemed to contain classified information. In one case, Comey had personally redacted such information before handing it to Richman, and in another, the FBI deemed the material classified only after it was in Richman’s possession.

Comey has said he shared the memos with Richman under the assumption that they would be shared with the news media and to put pressure on the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to oversee the FBI’s Russia investigation. The inspector general has questioned witnesses about the matter, and FBI agents conducted a search of Richman’s New York office to ensure that the leak was contained.

The inspector general’s review was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“This is a stain on James Comey’s judgment when it comes to law enforcement matters,” Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said Friday afternoon on CNN. He said Comey’s decision to leak the memos to his friend “raises serious question about his judgment and his integrity.”

Democrats said Friday that Republicans had failed in their efforts to discredit Comey’s assertions about the president’s private behavior. They predicted that the memos would help investigators piece together a case against Trump and his associates.

“The simple fact is they unquestionably show pressure by the president to stymie or stop the investigation, and so they are more evidence of attempts to obstruct justice,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Blumenthal accused Republicans of trying — with little success — to twist the meaning of the memos.

“They are pretty much raw history, which people can spin to serve their partisan purposes,” he said.

Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., a moderate who has criticized efforts to undermine the Russia investigation, said both sides were misguided if they thought the release of the full memos would effect the fundamentals of the case.

“There might be some salacious details here,” Dent said, “but nothing is changing the overall narrative on the Mueller investigation.”