As those reading this have probably found out by now, James Comey’s memos about his interactions with Trump during his limited tenure as FBI Director in Trump’s administration were leaked Thursday night. Given that the House Republicans had just been pressuring Deputy AG Rosenstein to release the memos by this Monday, and were just given these memos by DOJ earlier today, the obvious conclusion is that House Republicans are most likely the source of the public leak of these memos to the various news agencies (and by extension, any potential defendants like Trump). The following quote from Bloomberg’s coverage on their angle:
The Republican chairmen of three House committees say memos written by former FBI Director James Comey recounting conversations with President Donald Trump show that Comey never "felt obstructed or threatened."
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy suggest the memos "would be Defense Exhibit A" if Trump were charged with obstruction of justice.
The chairmen released a joint statement after the memos were delivered to Congress Thursday. The Associated Press obtained the memos.
Now, I doubt readers of this site would be all that surprised if one of these guys or their staff promptly leaked the Comey memos once they got their hands on them, and perhaps you might not even find that aspect particularly interesting. Also, after reading through the memos, their content really isn’t all that surprising in general, since most of the juicy bits from them have already been discussed at length by Comey himself, both in his post firing testimony last year and in his recent book tour.
But there is one interesting detail in the memos that I hadn’t heard about before, and the timing of it is striking, and I doubt Thursday’s leakers of the Comey memos appreciated it in their haste. It involves the case of the recently pardoned Scooter Libby, and the reporter who went to jail for contempt of court in order to not divulge that leak: Judith Miller. Trump mentioned her name himself, back in February 2017, according to Comey’s memos.
The Valerie Plame case has been discussed much here as a major scandal during the GW Bush era, so I’ll try keep it brief and please forgive any cut corners in the following summary. Plame was outed as a CIA operative in a leak to the media, and consequently special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate and subsequently prosecute the matter by the then recently appointed deputy attorney general, James Comey. Scooter Libby was the only one ultimately convicted by the probe, for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. However Libby’s prison sentence was immediately commuted by President Bush and Libby served no time, but Libby was not pardoned at the time, not until the recent pardon by Trump last Friday. However, someone did go to jail as a part of the Plame affair, and that was Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times.
Judy Miller wasn’t the one who outed Plame to the general public, that dubious distinction goes to the late Robert Novak. However, she had gotten a leak about Plame from Libby. Miller was caught up in the investigation and she refused to name her source to the grand jury. Subsequently she was jailed for contempt of court for a few months, and her condition as a jailed reporter for refusing to out sources resulted in substantial controversy. Eventually Miller was released when she agreed to testify after Libby urged her to cooperate with the special prosecutor.
This all may seem like a bit of ancient history that only became relevant due to Trump’s pardon of Scooter Libby and the familiar names and the familiar crimes. Trump’s motive for the pardon was immediately questioned, especially by Plame herself, and whether it was meant to send a message to Trump underlings that they would be taken care of if they committed similar crimes. Alternative theories have been suggested too, Victoria Toensing was a friend of Libby and brought up his case to the WH counsel, and she was part of the pair with Joe DiGenova who was almost brought on board to Trump’s legal defense team for the current special prosecution, so perhaps Trump was prompted in part by them. There was also the question of how aware Trump was of the Libby case before pardoning him.
That brings us back to the subject of the day, the Comey memos, which have some additional context to these very matters, a detail that I was not aware of previously, and it casts an even darker shadow over that pardon. One of the main recurring subjects of the Comey memos was leaks, and this is from page 11:
I then explained why leaks purporting to be about FBI intelligence operations were also terrible and a serious violation of the law. I explained that the FBI gathers intelligence in part to equip the President to make decisions, and if people run around telling the press what we do, that ability will be compromised. I said I was eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message. I said something about it being difficult and he replied that we need to go after the reporters, and referred to the fact that 10 or 15 years ago we put them in jail to find out what they know, and it worked. He mentioned Judy Miller by name. I explained that I was a fan of pursuing leaks aggressively but that going after reporters was tricky, for legal reasons and because DOJ tends to approach it conservatively. He replied by telling me to talk to “Sessions” and to see what we can do about being more aggressive. I told him I would speak to the Attorney General.
This was written by Comey on the date of 2/14/2017. Most of the commentators I’ve noticed have been up in arms about this passage because Trump wants to jail reporters, but the huge takeaway to me, the big surprise is that he was familiar with the Judy Miller case. Way back then, before Comey was fired and this obstruction of justice and Russia investigation blew up in the public, Trump brought up the jailing of Judy Miller behind closed doors. And this text doesn’t suggest that Trump was prompted to do so by someone else at the meeting.
This should wash away notions of Trumpian ignorance in the Libby pardon, and really hints at a deeper scandalous nature of it. Trump hated leakers at least as recently as last year, and was pushing to go great lengths to go after them, and knew at least some recent history on the matter. His statement on the pardon was thus:
“I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a White House statement, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”
That doesn’t pass the smell test in light of Comey’s memo, when Trump was holding up Libby’s counterpart, Judy Miller, as an example of how imprisonment should be used as a weapon against reporters to go after leakers. I know it may seem like shooting fish in a barrel to show inconsistency or incoherence in Trump’s worldview, but this lays pretty bare that ignorance or idiocy is not always at the root.
He knew what he was doing when he pardoned Scooter Libby.