WASHINGTON — The Justice Department inspector general released on Thursday a report that was highly critical of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey’s handling of memos detailing his interactions with the president, accusing him of setting “a dangerous example” for officials with access to government secrets.
The findings were the result of a lengthy investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general, who examined whether Mr. Comey had acted inappropriately when he gave one of the memos to a confidant who later provided its contents to The New York Times. Mr. Comey has said he helped make the information public in part to bring about the appointment of a special counsel.
“Comey violated F.B.I. policy and the requirements of his F.B.I. employment agreement when he chose this path,” the report said.
President Trump and his allies are sure to use the report’s conclusions to attack Mr. Comey, whom the president fired abruptly in 2017 and partly blames for opening the Russia investigation, which threatened his presidency from its inception.
The report is the latest chapter in the story of Mr. Comey, who was castigated last year as part of a broader inspector general’s investigation that examined his handling of the Hillary Clinton email inquiry. In trying to protect the F.B.I., the earlier report said, Mr. Comey instead damaged its reputation. He was insubordinate by keeping hidden from Justice Department leaders his plans to hold a news conference on the Clinton investigation and violated department policy by publicly discussing the inquiry, the inspector general found.
Mr. Comey responded by noting that the report found he had violated no laws and criticized those who had accused him of lying or leaking information.
“I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a ‘sorry we lied about you’ would be nice,” he wrote on Twitter, challenging his critics to stop trusting “people who gave you bad info for so long, including the president.”
Mr. Comey has said he would not do anything differently if faced with the same set of choices. Rod J. Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, has said that Mr. Comey’s intransigence was partly why he backed firing Mr. Comey.
Mr. Comey’s memos, first revealed in Times articles in the days after his dismissal two years ago, angered the president with their accounts of his demands of loyalty from typically independent law enforcement officials.
Mr. Comey kept several memos at his home and shared one with a friend when he thought they contained only routine information, but the F.B.I. determined that some of the documents included classified material, prompting an investigation into whether he mishandled them.
Members of Mr. Comey’s inner circle, including the former F.B.I. lawyers Lisa Page and James A. Baker, along with the senior agent Peter Strzok, were assigned to examine the memos and determined that at least two contained classified information. That prompted the F.B.I. to upgrade them to confidential, the lowest level of the classified system. The material dealt with foreign relations and not more closely held secrets like the names of sources or information-gathering methods.
The case was referred to prosecutors, who quickly determined that it did not warrant charges, people familiar with the inquiry have said.
Mr. Comey wrote the memos after meeting with Mr. Trump in the first days and weeks of his presidency, saying later that he worried that the president would lie about their discussions. Mr. Trump and his allies accused Mr. Comey of illegally leaking the memos as they tried to undermine his standing as a key witness in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
The F.B.I. collected four memos from Mr. Comey’s house in Virginia in June 2017, and he told agents he had written two others. The F.B.I. eventually recovered seven memos in total, which were later turned over to Mr. Mueller. Congress made the memos public in April 2018, and Mr. Comey wrote about them in a book published last year.