FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday that he was looking into whether agents at the bureau leaked sensitive information to reporters or public figures, including close Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, during the 2016 election.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asked about former FBI official Jim Kallstrom’s and Giuliani’s claims that they had inside information about the bureau’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
“Now either they’re lying or there is a serious problem within the bureau,” Leahy said. “Did anybody in the FBI during this 2016 campaign have contact with Rudy Giuliani about the Clinton investigation?”
“I don’t know yet, but if I find out that people were leaking information about our investigations whether to reporters or private parties, there will be severe consequences,” Comey replied.
He said he was “very, very interested” in getting to the bottom of the issue, and that he would inform the committee once the FBI did so.
In multiple cable news interviews in the run-up to the election, Giuliani boasted that former agents had clued him into the “revolution coming on in the FBI” about how the probe into Clinton’s email server was handled.
