More than half of James Comey's private memos contained classified information

James Comey.
(Image credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

Most of the memos fired FBI Director James Comey created to document his interactions with President Trump before his ouster contained classified information, a revelation that casts in a new light his decision to leak those memos to the press via a friend.

Comey told Congress last month he considered the memos to be personal papers containing his "unclassified" "recollection recorded of my conversation with the president" which he distributed to the press as a "private citizen." During the same testimony, he agreed with a senator's characterization of the memos as something other than a "government document."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.