The Comey Memos

The memos can be read here.  Aside from all the commentary on the memos’ content, a couple of other things jump out at me.

One is the level of classification: SECRET/NOFORN.  Comey noted at their start that he was unsure of the memos’ classification, so he marked them SECRET and invited his addressees to correct that as required.  One or more of them considered NOFORN—nor for foreign viewing, even if otherwise cleared to the level of secrecy; this is an addendum that gets added to unclassified material, too, on occasion—to be a suitable addition.  Reading around the redactions, this seems an obvious need.

The bigger deal though, is the amount of redaction that actually was done.  Out of 15 total pages of memos, some 34 lines had something redacted, and most of that was just a couple of words or a short phrase.  That little bit didn’t take all this time and the threat of a subpoena to get the memos marked and released to the House committees demanding them.  That emphasizes the question of what the FBI was trying to hide with its intransigence in stonewalling the release.

And that raises another question in my pea brain: having read the memos, there’s nothing in them that should have caused embarrassment to the FBI.  So: what else is the FBI hiding, what is it holding back that we haven’t heard about?

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