'Felony offenses': House Oversight chairman's remarks in 2015 email leak spark calls for investigation

A Kentucky congressman is facing calls for an inquiry over comments he made in a New York Times interview suggesting he may have been involved in a law firm’s leaked emails during his 2015 gubernatorial bid, The Louisville Courier Journal reports.

James Comer, a Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, implied in the interview that he was behind leaked emails that were used in a Lexington Herald-Leader article “showing an attorney married to a rival candidate's running mate had been in contact with a blogger who was making allegations that Comer had abused a former girlfriend,” the Courier Journal reports.

The Congressional Integrity Project in a letter to Fayette County Commonwealth Attorney Kimberly Baird earlier this week asked that Comer's involvement in unlawfully obtaining stolen emails from the law firm’s server be investigated.

"No one should be above the law, and information revealed yesterday in an article published in the New York Times provides strong reason to believe that Representative Comer committed at least one, and perhaps multiple, felony offenses during his failed attempt to secure the Republican nomination for governor in 2015," the group’s executive director Kyle Herrig said in the letter, according to the report.

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Comer spokesman Austin Hacker said allegations are without merit in a statement obtained by The Courier Journal.

"The Congressional Integrity Project is a dark money, left-wing funded group whose sole mission is to smear Republicans conducting oversight of the Biden Administration,” Hacker said.

According to The New York Times report, "Comer confirmed, for the first time, that he had been behind the leak and strongly hinted he had gotten them from the server."

“I’ve had two servers in my lifetime,” Comer said in the interview.

“Hunter Biden’s is one, and you can — I’m not going to say who the other one was, but you can use your imagination,” Comer said, according to the report.

He noted that the emails "ended up in my lap ... I’ll put it like that.”