Trump's personal lawyer to file complaint after Comey testimony, source says

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A look at the road to James Comey's Senate testimony

Chief congressional correspondent Mike Emanuel reports

President Trump’s lawyer will file a complaint with the Department of Justice’s Inspector General's Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee after it was revealed Thursday that former FBI director James Comey leaked memos to a friend in order to inform the media about conversations with the president, a source told Fox News.

It is not clear when the attorney, Marc Kasowitz, will file the complaint. But the move appears to show that team Trump is trying to go on the offensive after Comey’s testimony.

Kasowitz is focusing on part of the testimony where Comey said he leaked the private conversation he had with Trump in order to prompt the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian interference.

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“I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, ‘cause it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation; there might be a tape,” Comey said. “And my judgment was I needed to get that out in the public square so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. So I asked a close friend of mine to do it.”

Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and close friend of Comey, has confirmed he leaked contents of one of Comey’s memos to The New York Times. Richman served with Comey in the Southern District of New York and at the FBI.

Kasowitz said in a statement that "Comey’s excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information and appears to entirely retaliatory.  We will leave it the appropriate authorities to determine whether this leaks should be investigated along with all those others being investigated."

Comey, during his testimony, accused the Trump administration of “spreading “lies, plain and simple” about him and the FBI in the aftermath of his abrupt firing last month, declaring that the administration “defamed him and more importantly the FBI.”

In that testimony he had already disclosed that Trump demanded his "loyalty" and directly pushed him to "lift the cloud" of investigation by declaring publicly the president was not the target of the FBI probe into his campaign's Russia ties.

Comey said that he declined to do so in large part because of the "duty to correct" that would be created if that situation changed. Comey also said in his written testimony that Trump, in a strange private encounter near the grandfather clock in the Oval Office, pushed him to end his investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Fox News' John Roberts and The Associated Press contributed to this report