The Department of Justice's internal watchdog is investigating James Comey for leaking classified information by sharing memos about his meetings with Trump with a friend, it has been reported.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the infamous memos and how the ousted FBI director leaked them were part of an ongoing probe by the inspector general.
Comey's treatment of them, including him giving them to the media, is part of the investigation, it was reported.
The revelation prompted a tweet from the president, who previously dubbed Comey a 'leaker and a liar'.
Trump, suggesting that the probe undermined the ongoing Special Counsel investigation into his campaign and administration's ties with Russia, said: 'Trump tweeted late Friday: ‘James Comey illegally leaked classified documents to the press in order to generate a Special Council[sic]?
‘Therefore, the Special Council [sic] was established based on an illegal act? Really, does everybody know what that means?’
The leaked memos contained Comey's contemporaneous claim that in February, Trump asked him to end an investigation into his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn who resigned after lying to the FBI about his contact with Russian officials.
Trump was most likely referring to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Friday about a review of Comey’s memos by the Department of Justice’s internal watchdog.
Two of the memos that Comey wrote and then gave to a friend from outside of the government contained classified information, according to the Journal.
In one memo, Comey redacted the parts that he knew to be classified before he gave them to a friend.
But the second memo is said to have information that was later upgraded to ‘confidential’ - the lowest level of classification.
Those memos are now being reviewed by the inspector general of the Department of Justice.
Comey has said that he leaked the memos after he was fired by Trump as head of the FBI because he felt a duty ‘as a private citizen’ to ensure that a Special Counsel be named to continue the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
Comey gave four memos to Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Columbia Law School.
Of the four memos, three were not classified at the time and one did have classified information that Comey himself redacted.
An FBI director has the power to determine what information is regarded as classified and what is not.
But once Comey became a private citizen, the FBI is legally authorized to determine what counts as classified information.
Sometime after Comey’s firing, the FBI upgraded the classification of the memos.
