James Comey, the former F.B.I. director targeted by President Trump, pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges he lied to Congress. His lawyer said he would move to quickly dismiss the case, calling it a “vindictive” and “selective” prosecution.
Mr. Comey, wearing a dark suit and accompanied by his family, bent his 6-foot-8 frame to offer his plea, and a “thank you very much,” to District Judge Michael Nachmanoff during a brisk court appearance that began five minutes early and lasted less than half an hour.
If the hearing offered a guide to the defense’s strategy, it revealed little new about a case deemed so weak by career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia that they refused to have anything to do with it. That reluctance forced the White House to quickly insert a stand-in U.S. attorney to file the indictment.
Mr. Comey’s lead lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, vented his exasperation in the hearing, saying that his “first substantive contact” with prosecutors came Tuesday night. He said he still had not received specific details of the charges, including the identities of witnesses, beyond the two-page indictment approved by a split grand jury on Sept. 25.
The indictment of Mr. Comey is the most significant legal action yet taken against those Mr. Trump has publicly targeted for retribution. It came shortly after the president all but commanded Attorney General Pam Bondi to take legal action against Mr. Comey; Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat; and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
If the intention of Mr. Trump and his allies was to humiliate Mr. Comey, they appeared to lose round one.
An uninitiated observer might even have mistaken the defense for the prosecution on Wednesday, given the lopsided power dynamic. To the judge’s right stood Mr. Comey, the former head of the F.B.I. and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, and Mr. Fitzgerald, a former federal prosecutor known for winning convictions in major terrorism and public corruption cases.
On the left, at the prosecutors table, sat Lindsey Halligan, who was making her second-ever appearance as a prosecutor after she was hastily installed by Mr. Trump as the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia last month. She was picked after her predecessor was ousted after finding insufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey.
Ms. Halligan, a former insurance lawyer, did not speak in court. Instead, she spent the hearing rocking and nodding in her chair as a junior federal prosecutor brought in from North Carolina spoke for the Justice Department.
Once Mr. Fitzgerald requested a jury trial on Mr. Comey’s behalf, Judge Nachmanoff, a Biden appointee and former federal public defender, made it clear he wanted a move quickly. He initially suggested the matter could be wrapped up by mid-December but set a trial date of Jan. 5 after both sides wanted a bit more time.
The prosecutor, Nathaniel Tyler Lemons, drew the judge’s impatience when he suggested that the government needed time to introduce classified evidence and argued that the case, which hinges on a single accusation that Mr. Comey lied during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, was complex.
“I’m a little skeptical,” Judge Nachmanoff replied. “This does not appear to me to be an overly complicated case.”
Mr. Comey’s arraignment, for all its brevity, was considerably more eventful than typical preliminary proceedings.
In the most significant development, Mr. Fitzgerald said he intended to file two motions to dismiss the case. The first will accuse the government of “vindictive” and “selective” prosecution based on Mr. Trump’s public demand that Mr. Comey be prosecuted. The second will seek to challenge what he called the illegal appointment of Ms. Halligan as U.S. attorney.
Judge Nachmanoff said he would rule on the first and outsource the question of Ms. Halligan’s appointment to another judge.
The government told the judge that it expects Mr. Comey’s trial to last two to three days. The judge tentatively scheduled a follow-up hearing later this month and released Mr. Comey on his own recognizance with no restrictions on his travel or other activities.
Politics shadowed the sunny sixth-floor courtroom, crammed to overflow with reporters, supporters of Mr. Comey and a small contingent of local residents.
A handful of protesters staged a decorous, nearly noiseless anti-Trump protest outside the courthouse, including one woman who brandished a sign that read “Show Trial.”
Mr. Comey faces up to five years in prison if convicted, though many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove — if his lawyers do not succeed in getting the charges quickly dismissed. He made no immediate public comments after the hearing.
Ms. Halligan, who narrowly secured a two-count indictment after a shaky solo appearance before the grand jury, has had a hard time getting anyone in her new office to help her with the case, according to current and former prosecutors in the office.
Two prosecutors who work in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Tyler Lemons and Gabriel Diaz, gave official notice on Tuesday that they had been assigned to the case, according to court records.
The case has cast a corrosive pall over the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the most important federal prosecutor’s offices in the nation.
Erik S. Siebert, the district’s former U.S. attorney, came under pressure from Mr. Trump after telling his superiors in the Justice Department that there was not enough evidence against Mr. Comey or, in a separate potential case, Ms. James. Mr. Siebert quit on Sept. 19, hours after the president called for his ouster.
Since then, Justice Department appointees have fired without cause two career prosecutors who also objected to the Comey indictment. Other officials in the Eastern District of Virginia have applied for jobs on the outside or have written memos justifying their actions in case they have to contest personnel actions or sue the department.
The bare-bones, two-page indictment against Mr. Comey was signed only by Ms. Halligan, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who had been serving as a midlevel lawyer in the office of the White House staff secretary.
Mr. Comey was indicted on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.
Court records indicate that Ms. Halligan also failed to get the grand jury to indict Mr. Comey on a second false statement charge.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
Minho Kim covers breaking news and climate change for The Times. He is based in Washington.
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