HILLARY'S GUNGA DIN:

The existence of the memos became known shortly after Comey was fired on May 9, 2017. It is only natural that they raised alarm. One would expect that if a president and an FBI director met several times, memos documenting those conversations would contain at least some classified information. Comey, moreover, brazenly acknowledged that he had orchestrated the leak of at least a portion of one memo to the New York Times. That is not normal.

Nevertheless, Comey is very smart. And you don't have to agree with his politics or like his style to realize that he has spent much of his career protecting national security. By definition, when information is classified, that means its unauthorized disclosure could damage American national security. Might Comey mishandle classified information? Sure, it's possible -- plenty of smart, patriotic public officials have done that. But to me, it is implausible that Comey would knowingly do that, much less intentionally transmit classified intelligence to the media.

That said, the classified-information facet of this episode has been exaggerated. There were seven memos in all, totaling 15 pages. Our understanding is that Comey tried to avoid putting classified information in them, and believed he had succeeded. Yet after obtaining and accounting for all of them, the FBI designated two of them as "confidential," the lowest level of classification. We do not know at this point (or, at least, I don't know) whether the memo leaked to the Times -- regarding the February 2017 Trump-Comey discussion of the investigation of former national-security adviser Michael Flynn -- was one of the classified ones. But we can easily deduce that Comey neither intended it to be classified nor thought it was. At one point in the memo, Comey wrote, "NOTE: Because this is an unclassified document, I will be limited in how I describe what I said next."

We know that Comey shared this memo with a friend (who is also a friend of mine, and who was his intermediary with the Times), and that he shared at least some of the memos with his lawyers (who are also friends of mine). From a classified-information standpoint, however, we are talking about a small number of documents, and it is unclear that Comey knew anything in them was classified. Even if he turned out to be wrong about that, it is highly unlikely that prosecutors could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was grossly negligent in mishandling them, much less that he willfully mishandled them.

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