President Trump’s personal attorney plans to file a complaint against fired FBI Director James B. Comey with the Justice Department over his leaking of memos on his conversations with the president, a source close to the president’s legal team said Friday.
A complaint will be filed early next week with the Justice Department’s inspector general regarding the leak, and there will also be a “submission” to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Comey’s testimony before both Senate Judiciary and Senate Intelligence committees, the source said.
Mr. Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday that after his firing last month, he gave memos to a friend to leak to the media, in hopes it would provoke the appointment of a special counsel. The memos detailed Mr. Comey’s conversations with the president earlier this year in which Mr. Comey said Mr. Trump demanded loyalty and pressured him to back off an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
The president, through lawyer Marc Kasowitz, has denied those actions.
The Trump team is also interested in Mr. Comey’s testimony on May 3 to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a week before he was fired, in which Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican and the panel’s chairman, asked whether the FBI director was ever the source of anonymous news articles.
“Director Comey, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?” Mr. Grassley asked.
“Never,” Mr. Comey said.
Mr. Grassley asked whether the FBI was investigating leaks of classified information about the president or his associates.
“I don’t want to answer that question, senator, for reasons I think you know,” Mr. Comey said at the time. “Leaks are always a problem, especially in the last three to six months.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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