Not ‘Top Secret’
President Donald Trump kicked the week off early Monday morning by accusing Jim Comey of a felony after “Fox & Friends” minutes earlier had run a questionable report wrongly claiming the former FBI Director shared memos detailing his conversations with Trump which contained “top secret” information.Â
Trump of course has the assets of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies at his disposal, so he could have simply asked his Director of National intelligence if the Fox News report is true. Instead, he retweeted the “Fox & Friends” video clip, and did not bother to read the news report it’s based on, which does not even use the words “top secret.”
“James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!” Trump tweeted at 6:40 AM.
Minites earlier he retweeted this “Fox & Friends” clip:
The “Fox & Friends” news clip is based on a policy article at The Hill, a right-leaning news site. It’s written by John Solomon, but The Hill does not offer any biographical information on him. There is a John Solomon, formerly of The Washington Times, and now at Sinclair’s Circa News. That Solomon has a history of writing articles favoring Trump and Mike Flynn. In 2008 ThinkProgress wrote that “Solomon’s reporting has been heavily criticized in the blogosphere for over hyping minor stories, omitting key facts and twisting out of context the meaning of statements.”
The Hill’s article says four of the seven memos “Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.”Â
It adds: “Four of the memos had markings making clear they contained information classified at the ‘secret’ or ‘confidential’ level, according to officials directly familiar with the matter.”
But key information is buried in The Hill’s article, which says it is “unclear when the documents were shown to Congress whether the information deemed ‘secret’ or ‘confidential’ was classified at the time Comey wrote the memos or determined so afterwards, the sources said.”
So there is no way of knowing if Comey’s memos he gave to a Columbia professor had classified information, and they easily could have been marked classified after he shared them.
Trump is literally pointing to a second-hand report of an article using unnamed sources, a practice he has denigrated at every opportunity.
In short, The Hill’s reporting is inconclusive and contains a good deal of conjecture.
One Vox reporter had this to say:
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