As reported by the non-partisan FactCheck.org:
Comey and ‘Classified’ Information
Trump said: “But these people, there were so many lies, and lies before Congress, which is just about the ultimate, sworn testimony where Comey told so much. And he leaked – he leaked classified information. Well, if somebody in our team leaked classified information, it would be years in jail.”
The facts: We’ve explained Comey has admitted that, after he was fired as FBI director in May 2017, he shared with his “legal team” copies of four of the seven memos he had written about his interactions with Trump. But Comey said the four memos he shared were all unclassified at the time, including a February 2017 memo, which he instructed Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman to relay the “substance” of to the New York Times.
In that memo, Comey wrote that when he met with Trump, the president brought up the FBI investigation of former National Security Adviser Flynn and said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
Comey said he sent Richman to the Times with that information with the hope that it “might prompt the appointment of a special counsel” in the Russia investigation.
In an April town hall event broadcast on CNN, Comey said he had decided that only three of the seven memos he wrote contained classified information. However, when all seven of Comey’s memos were sent to Congress in April 2018, four of them had markings indicating they contained some classified information. That means one of the memos that Comey previously shared was “up-classified,” which refers to information that is retroactively deemed classified when documents are reviewed for public release.
We don’t know which memo that was, but we know it wasn’t the one Comey told Richman to convey to the Times. When that was made public, the memo was labeled “unclassified//FOUO,” which the National Archives and Records Administration says is used by some federal agencies for documents “requiring a degree of control” but does “not designate classified national security information.”
Update, Aug. 29, 2019: The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General issued a report Aug. 29, 2019, that said Comey gave a copy of one memo (identified as “memo 4”) to Richman with instructions to share the contents of the memo with a reporter. The FBI later determined that memo 4 “did not contain classified information,” according to the report.
“We found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the Memos to members of the media,” the IG report said.
