RUTHFULLY YOURS

James Comey is changing his story.

With the heat on about the Federal Bureau of Investigation manipulation of the U.S. election to “get” Trump the news of the day, it seems that his old tale of leaking FBI documents to a Columbia Law School professor pal, Daniel Richman, is now that the guy was his attorney all along.

According to The Federalist:

A friend of former FBI director James Comey who leaked sensitive FBI memos to The New York Times in the wake of Comey’s firing in 2017 now claims to be Comey’s personal attorney.  Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, told The Federalist via phone on Tuesday afternoon that he [is] now personally representing Comey.

The revelation comes in the wake of news that Comey was interviewed by the special counsel’s office last year.  According to The New York Times, the line of questioning from the office of [S]pecial [C]ounsel Robert Mueller focused on memos that Comey wrote and later leaked after he was fired from his job by President Donald Trump.  A review of FBI policies governing the handling of sensitive government documents suggests [that] Comey violated FBI policy by leaking the memos, which were produced on government time, using government equipment, and directly related to his official government responsibilities, according to Comey’s own testimony before Congress.

The Federalist’s Sean Davis, who got the scoop, reports that Richman got at least one classified document from the Comey pile, which wouldn’t be legal even if he had been Comey’s attorney.

At the same time, the new claim to attorney representation in the Comey-Richman relationship looks a lot like a bid to shield the both of them from answering questions from Congress, due to attorney-client privilege.  Comey, recall, was Mister Noble Whistleblower when, upon being fired, he told Congress he had written up some memos and then got Richman to leak them to the press.

Given that Richman is an old pal of Comey’s, it looks like an effort to weasel out of potential legal troubles now that the long knives are out for the FBI – and could easily be an agreement between friends.  How convenient that they are both lawyers, too.

It underlines that the heat is on, and Comey sounds as though he’d prefer to avoid any responsibility for his role in this growing bonfire of a fiasco.  If so, maybe the media’s loud claims that the problems are all in the congressional inquiries and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is zeroing in on President Trump aren’t the real direction this news is going.  The sudden claim to attorneyship from Comey looks a lot like a weaselly effort to get out of any accountability for his strange exoneration of Hillary Clinton and his agency’s inexplicable continuous targeting of President Trump.