The notion that they were classified comes from misleading/sloppy/incorrect reporting by Fox (big surprise)
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Why Were Republicans so Desperate to Release the Embarrassing Comey Memos? Here’s One Explanation.
By JEREMY STAHL
APRIL 20, 201812:48 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/why-were-republicans-so-desperate-to-release-the-embarrassing-comey-memos-heres-one-explanation.html
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What was the basis for saying Comey had leaked four memos—some of them classified in a way that would make such leaks illegal—to Richman? The criminal referral cited a letter from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley that was released in January.
According to press reports, Professor Daniel Richman of Columbia Law School stated that Mr. Comey provided him four of the seven memoranda and encouraged him to “detail [Comey’s] memos to the press.” If it’s true that Professor Richman had four of the seven memos, then in light of the fact that four of the seven memos the Committee reviewed are classified, it would appear that at least one memo the former FBI director gave Professor Richman contained classified information. Professor Richman later read a portion of one of the memos to a New York Times reporter.
Where did Grassley get the notion that Richman said Comey gave him four memos, indicating at least one was classified? Grassley’s letter cited a July 10 Fox News report titled “Comey Memos Reportedly Had Classified Info; Trump Says ‘That Is so illegal.’ ” In it, Richman is quoted as saying this:
“No memos were given to the press, and no memos were classified at the time I received them,” Richman told Fox News, explaining that the “substance” of one memo was given to the press but not the physical document.
“That was not classified at the time, and remains unclassified,” he said.
Richman told Fox News he received four memos from Comey, all of which were not marked.
Notice how Richman explicitly said
none of the memos he received were classified and that they
remained unclassified? And notice how that portion was
in quotes. Now, notice how the part about Richman receiving “four memos” was not in quotes, but rather Fox News’ description of what it says the organization was told?
Now: In the documents released on Thursday, there were two memos with the header “UNCLASSIFIED // FOUOU” on them, both of which overlap with what had been reported in the New York Times and in Comey’s testimony. The number of pages in those two unclassified documents: four. (There was also a third single-page, one-paragraph document that was also marked unclassified, a March 1, 2017, email.)
This all ultimately seems to explain why House Republicans were so eager to get these memos into the public. It seems as though they thought the memos would prove Comey had illegally leaked classified information and lied about it. It seems as though they were basing this entirely on a bit of contradictory—and likely inaccurate—Fox News reporting. And it seems that this contradictory, likely inaccurate reporting was done by Fox News to help validate this Donald Trump tweet, which was sent two days after Comey’s Senate testimony:
Snip
Finally, it seems that the memos released prove the exact
opposite: The apparently leaked documents were
never and
still aren’t classified.
Much much more at link
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