NEW POLL: Majority of Americans Say Comey Should Be Prosecuted for Leaking to Media

Monica Sanchez | September 3, 2019
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A new poll released by Rasmussen on Tuesday shows that a majority of Americans (47%) want fired FBI director James Comey to be criminally prosecuted for improperly leaking information to the media.

“That’s up from 41% in 2017 but essentially unchanged from April of last year,” reports Rasmussen. “Thirty-five percent (35%) disagree, while a sizable 18% are undecided.”

The poll’s findings come after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General concluded in a report that Comey had violated DOJ and FBI policies as well as his employee agreement in his handling of memos detailing conversations with President Trump.

The report also confirmed that Comey gave one such memo to his friend Daniel Richman, “who, at Comey's request, shared the contents of one of the Memos with a reporter for The New York Times.”

That memo in particular alleges Trump asked Comey to drop an investigation into his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

“By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information,” the report said.

“As described in this report, we conclude that Comey’s retention, handling, and dissemination of certain Memos violated Department and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement,” the report stated.

The DOJ, despite the scathing findings by the Inspector General's Office, decided not to prosecute Comey. 

Comey on Friday tweeted that he was owed an "apology" for being defamed by his critics about leaking classified information, though the report did, in fact, find that Comey leaked sensitive information to the press that he had no business sharing or holding onto in the first place, and that one of the memos he kept after his firing did contain classified material. 

The Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely U.S. voters was conducted Sept. 1-2 and has a margin sampling error of 3 percentage points.

(Cover Photo: Flickr / FBI)
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