Third Comey indictment rests on a 2016 leak the government investigated and declined to charge

…(cont) That's the order. I'm not drawing anything from it. I just like the dates in a row where I can see them.

Now, the notebook. His lawyers — hold on, I had this — here. They say the case centers on an issue "that had already been investigated and had not led to charges." That's the Times, quoting them, about a leak to the Times. Investigated, no charges. NPR has them adding it's outside the time limit. A decade-old leak, is the phrase.

I'm sorry, I keep coming back to 2016, but it's the year the whole thing hangs on. Ten years. This one has had ten years and two previous tries at it.

One more thing about that year and then I'll move along. The Guardian says the filing "provides few details" about what was actually leaked, and that he conspired with a person the government doesn't name. So what's in hand is a year, two counts, and an unnamed person.

Here's where I get stuck, and it isn't clever, it's a box.

I keep a box of papers in my garage. Summer before last I sat out there on an upturned bucket and went through every sheet in it, and when I finished I wrote on the lid with a marker: checked, nothing here. My dog sleeps on that lid now. Twice since, I've moved the dog, carried the box across the yard and into the house, and gone through it again — once when the car needed a fan belt and I was sure the receipt was in there, once because I'd forgotten I ever wrote on the lid.

That's me, with a bucket and a marker, and it costs me an afternoon. Forgive me for circling, but what I can't put down is that somebody in that building walked to a drawer, pulled the 2016 file, carried it across a room, set it on a desk, and read the part where it says the matter had not led to charges. And then the counts got typed. Somebody carried that file across a room.

Excuse me — before you go, there's one page left and then I'm out of your way.

The same Monday those counts unsealed, the judge ruled the firing of his daughter illegal. She worked the sex crimes case against the president's dead former friend. The wire gives one reason for her losing the job, and the reason is her father. Two counts, one defendant, one person the filing won't name: I count her name in that zero times.

So here's the last one, and the answer is on the page. Of the two counts the department filed Monday, how many name the prosecutor a judge said that same Monday was fired illegally — and what's the one year the filing does name? I'm sorry. I keep coming back to 2016.