The trial of James Comey’s friend could derail plans to re-indict the former FBI director

Daniel Richman, a friend and former lawyer of James Comey, is suing the Justice Department over evidence gathered from him years ago that was used in the recently dismissed criminal case against Comey, which could derail the Trump administration’s imminent plan to re-indict the former FBI director.

Evidence gathered from the Justice Department’s collection of Richman’s online accounts, iPhones, iPads and hard drives in 2019 and 2020 was becoming a critical issue in the criminal case against Comey in Northern Virginia that was dismissed last month.

Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, is asking a federal court in Washington, D.C., to issue an emergency injunction to block the Justice Department’s access to Richman’s files and to hear whether the Justice Department violated Richman’s constitutional rights.

He says the Justice Department’s continued access to his files is a “total disregard” of his Fourth Amendment rights, which protect against unreasonable searches and government seizures.

“There is no legal basis for the government to retain any images of Professor Richman’s computer, whether stored on a hard drive or elsewhere,” her lawsuit says. “The government’s conduct has deprived Professor Richman of his constitutional rights, and Professor Richman’s injury will continue unless his property is returned.”

Richman’s new requests to the court now create the possibility that the judge could further investigate allegations of prosecutorial misconduct that were not fully uncovered or prosecuted in the Comey case before it was dismissed last Monday, or that prosecutors related to Comey’s 200 trials could seek to suppress evidence as they try to withdraw charges against Comey.

D.C. District Court Judge Colleen Koller-Cotelli, a jurist experienced in national security matters and a Bill Clinton appointee, has not yet responded to Richman’s lawsuit, according to court records. The Justice Department has not responded. The original search court records from years ago, when the Justice Department sought warrants to obtain Richman’s email, iCloud and other accounts and other data, are also still under seal in DC District Court.

In many ways, Richman’s case picks up where Comey’s case left off before it was dismissed.

Comey’s team was gaining ground before indicting the former FBI director in late September, arguing that the Justice Department and the FBI had mishandled evidence and its grand jury presentation. President Donald Trump has said publicly that he wants the Justice Department to prosecute Comey, and the indictment comes just days before the possibility of federal charges is over.

Comey pleaded not guilty before the charges were dismissed. The indictment alleges he misled Congress in 2020 about his interactions with Richman, and an Alexandria, Virginia, grand jury heard evidence from Richman files, according to court records.

A federal magistrate judge in Virginia wrote last month that the Justice Department, in its use of Richman’s years-old testimony before Comey’s grand jury this year, had taken a “cavalier attitude toward basic principles of the Fourth Amendment” and that prosecutors ultimately “were able to rummage through all the information Mr. Richman, at any time in the eyes of the government, seized from the app. They chose.”

The original search warrants, for a national defense leak investigation called Arctic Haze, did not authorize federal investigators to seize evidence related to the crime that Comey was eventually accused of lying to Congress about in 2020 testimony, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick said.

Richman’s evidence also lay dormant for years, and the Justice Department did not obtain new warrants to access it again this year for the Comey investigation, Fitzpatrick also noted. Additionally, the magistrate judge took issue with the Justice Department’s failure to put evidence through a proper process to filter out potentially confidential discussions between lawyers and their clients — in this case, with Comey as Richman’s client and others years ago. Comey’s team has said it never had access to the evidence before he was indicted.

The Arctic Haze investigation never resulted in a criminal case, and Richman was never charged.

“Although the Arctic Haze investigation concluded conclusively in 2021, the government has kept Professor Richman’s files unharmed to this day,” Richman’s attorneys wrote in their latest D.C. District Court filing on the new lawsuit. The Justice Department’s approach to evidence, they add, “exemplifies the very governmental abuses against which the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect.”

The Comey criminal case ended abruptly with a separate judge’s ruling that Trump-backed attorney Lindsey Halligan, who was serving as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and presented the case to a grand jury in late September, did not have prosecutorial authority at the time.

The dismissal largely cut off the defense team’s chances of an investigation, in the view of Halligan and investigators, because the criminal case was closed before Comey’s team gained access to his grand jury records and before he formally challenged the use of evidence in the case. The Justice Department plans to appeal the decision to dismiss Halligan, though that appeal has not been filed. Grand jury activity where the Justice Department tries to secure a new indictment may come first.

If a judge in federal court in DC does not block the Justice Department from touching the Richman evidence, Richman’s team will ask the court for testimony and other information “to determine the precise nature of the government’s conduct, why it did it, and whether it constituted callous disregard or intentional misconduct.”

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