Comey: Barr Deserves Benefit of the Doubt on Mueller Report

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: He says that he’s going to put it out with some redactions by mid-April. And the thing is, he’s also talked about these reductions and he says that he’ll redact secret grand jury testimony, material, the intelligence community identifies as potentially compromising sensitive sources and methods, material that could affect other ongoing matters, information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third-parties. Democrats fear that there will be an attempt to redact issues and elements that might damage the president or be uncomfortable for him. From your perspective, do you have confidence that enough of this will come out to satisfy everybody who wants to see it?

JAMES COMEY, FORMER FBI DIRECTOR: I can’t say for sure until we it. Those are reasonable concerns for Democrats to have. But Bill Barr, our attorney general, deserves the benefit of the doubt. Give him a chance to show us what he feels like he can’t show us. I have to imagine that the Former Director Mueller wrote the report with an eye towards it being public someday. So, I can imagine a lot needs to be cut out of it. But let’s wait and see. The attorney general deserves that chance.

AMANPOUR: What are normal redactions in cases like this? I mean, you must have seen a lot of this in your 10 years in all your positions. I mean — you know, I mean the jokes are that it will all be redacted except for a couple of words. You just said, give him the benefit of the doubt. But what should one expect beyond what he’s just said?

COMEY: Well, you should expect a good faith effort by the Department of Justice to protect the things that are in those categories. You don’t want to reveal classified information, you don’t want to damage ongoing investigations, you don’t want to smear people who have no real part in the investigation, but that’s all fairly easy to figure out if you know the case as Mueller’s people do.

AMANPOUR: And the Democrats promising to subpoena a full unredacted version. Do you think they’ll win that and should they, in Congress, elected officials, be allowed to see it with no redaction?

COMEY: I don’t know what would happen in a battle over a subpoena. I do know there’s a long tradition of sharing classified sensitive material with the leaders in Congress, chairs of relevant committees. So, it’s possible you will see one version go to most of the House and the public and a more full version go to selected leaders.

AMANPOUR: You’ve just said the attorney general deserves the benefit of the doubt. I guess, look, where do you come down on the immediate sort of Monday morning quarterbacking or analyzing of the little we know of the Mueller report? There’s some who said, “Well, you know, he punted, we don’t know what’s going on,” there are others who say, you know, the attorney general took that summary of his an scored “a touchdown” for the president. What should we make of the fallout in the few days since the report has been, you know, delivered to the Justice Department?

COMEY: Well, Monday morning quarterbacking, to borrow your term, is a natural thing. There’s been a whole lot of it done about decisions I’ve made. I think what we have to do is just keep an open mind and wait for the details.