Robert Barnes, legal expert, and a lawyer says there is probable cause that James Comey committed criminal espionage against President Trump and that charge carries a 10-year prison sentence. When Comey left the FBI, he took his memos with him.
The problem is those memos belong to the government. He also said it doesn’t matter if the Justice Department had a chance to classify them yet because the moment he wrote about his meetings with the president, they were automatically classified.
He believes that Comey will be tried, found guilty and sent to prison.
Robert Barnes from Barnes Law tweeted the following set of tweets last night about the legal jeopardy that crooked Comey put himself in –
“As explained on @foxnewsnight w/ @ShannonBream, there is probable cause @Comey committed CRIMINAL ESPIONAGE against Trump when he leaked #ComeyMemos. The law punishes espionage w/ a 10 year federal prison sentence & can be found at 18 USC 793(f). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793”
2/ Contrary to what you may hear, a person can be convicted of CRIMINAL ESPIONAGE even if they do not leak classified material & even if they only remove, but do not share, national security information. Criminal Espionage laws were written before we had a classification system.
— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) April 24, 2018
“2/ Contrary to what you may hear, a person can be convicted of CRIMINAL ESPIONAGE even if they do not leak classified material & even if they only remove, but do not share, national security information. Criminal Espionage laws were written before we had a classification system.”
3/ Criminal Espionage only requires proof that a person entrusted w/ “national defense-related” information remove that information from its proper place or disclose that information to an unauthorized person in either an intentional act or because of their “gross negligence.”
“4/ The courts have defined “national defense-related” information very broadly in the seminal Supreme Court case of Gorin v. United States, effectively deferring to the judgment of the jury as to what constitutes “national defense-related” information. ”
“5/ Some courts limited the Criminal Espionage statute to information which is “potentially dangerous” to disclose to national security and “closely held” information. That same court also said the information did not have to ever be classified for it to be a crime to disclose it.”
So, I guess that says it all. We got a long way to go but much less than we had yesterday.