Federal prosecutors are scrutinizing whether former FBI Director James Comey leaked classified information about a possible Russian disinformation campaign to journalists, according to a bombshell New York Times report.
The inquiry, which kicked off in recent months, appears to focus on information from documents that Dutch intelligence obtained from Russian computers and provided to the U.S. government, The Times reports, citing people familiar with the matter.
The story refers to news articles at The Times and Washington Post from 2017 that contained information about the intelligence.
According to The Times, Dutch intelligence turned over a Russian analysis of a purported email exchange from 2016 between Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was chair of the DNC, and Leonard Bernardo, an official with the Open Society Foundations, a left-wing activist group.
The email showed that Wasserman Schultz told Bernardo that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch would ensure that Hillary Clinton would not face prosecution over her private email server.
Comey has publicly cited information about Lynch as one of the reasons he circumvented the Justice Department to announce that he was not recommending prosecution of Clinton in the email case.
According to The Times, Wasserman Schultz and Bernardo denied having contact. Investigators believed that Russia may have planted the email on its servers to use as disinformation.
Prosecutors are also focusing on the role that longtime Comey confidante Daniel Richman may have played in a potential leak of the information.
The Justice Department’s inspector general faulted Comey for providing Richman with several memos of his conversations in 2017 with President Trump. Comey has acknowledged that he instructed Richman to share information from one of the memos with The Times after he was fired on May 9, 2017. Comey has also said that he authorized Richman to make the disclosure so that he could force the appointment of a special counsel to continue the Russia investigation.
The Justice Department declined to prosecute Comey over his handling of the memos.
According to The Times, prosecutors are looking at whether Richman played a role in disseminating information about the Dutch intelligence document. Richman, who has also served as a personal attorney for Comey, was quoted in an April 22, 2017 Times article that mentioned the Dutch document.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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