Justice Department lawyers said Tuesday that a recent ruling barring their access to key evidence has effectively crippled their efforts to reindict former FBI director James B. Comey, two weeks after their original case against him was dismissed.
The concession came in a court filing urging a federal judge in Washington to lift a temporary order she imposed Saturday restricting the government’s ability to review or use emails and other electronic communications seized as part of an investigation more than five years ago involving Comey confidante Daniel Richman.
Richman’s records had played a central role in the Justice Department’s effort to indict Comey on charges he lied during a 2020 congressional hearing about authorizing Richman to leak information to the media — allegations Comey has denied. Tuesday’s court filing raised new questions about prosecutors’ ability to pursue their case against the former FBI director.
Richman, a Columbia University law professor who briefly represented Comey as his attorney in 2017, has argued that the Justice Department’s current use of those files violates his constitutional rights. Justice Department officials wrote Tuesday that without access to the communications between the two men the government is “effectively enjoined … from investigating or prosecuting Comey.”
In granting Richman’s request to temporarily block the government’s access, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Saturday that he is likely to succeed in proving that prosecutors’ use of his records to prosecute Comey without obtaining a new warrant constitutes an unlawful search and seizure. She set her order to expire on Friday, granting the government an opportunity to respond while she weighs whether to make her order permanent.
In the filing Tuesday, prosecutors characterized Richman’s request as an improper backdoor effort to prevent Comey from being recharged.
“It is a strategic tool to obstruct the investigation and potential prosecution of James B. Comey,” they said.
Kollar-Kotelly’s order presented the latest roadblock in the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute President Donald Trump’s perceived enemies and political opponents.
Last month, another federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s original indictment against Comey on grounds that the prosecutor who obtained it — Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — had been unlawfully serving in that role and had no authority as a prosecutor when she presented the case to a grand jury.
That decision also led to the dismissal of a separate mortgage fraud indictment Halligan had secured against another of Trump’s political opponents, New York Attorney General Letitia James. A federal grand jury in Virginia rejected the government’s efforts last week to obtain a new indictment against James.
In Comey’s case, the judge that dismissed his indictment suggested any effort to recharge him would be complicated by the expiration of a five-year statute of limitations on the crimes the Justice Department says he committed. The original indictment was filed in September, shortly before that five-year deadline.
Despite that potential obstacle, the request from prosecutors to Kollar-Kotelly on Tuesday signaled a desire to try again in mounting a new case.
Halligan was among the Justice Department officials to sign Tuesday’s filing in Kollar-Kotelly’s court. Despite lingering questions over her legitimacy as U.S. attorney, her signature block included that title. Other signatories included Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, and Robert K. McBride, Halligan’s chief deputy in the eastern Virginia office.
Before the original indictment was dismissed, another judge who had overseen aspects of the Comey case had separately questioned the government’s use of Richman’s files, saying prosecutors may have improperly relied on them to secure Comey’s indictment without first obtaining a new search warrant allowing their use.
The FBI originally obtained Richman’s emails and text messages in 2019 and 2020 as part of a different inquiry into whether Comey had disclosed classified information to the media through Richman on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. That investigation was closed without charges.
Richman, in his request to Kollar-Kotelly last week, said prosecutors in that first probe had seized and analyzed more of his messages than the initial search warrants allowed and then unlawfully held onto them for years.
In an order Tuesday, Kollar-Kotelly granted Richman’s attorneys and the Justice Department until Wednesday to brief her on whether she should allow the government access to Richman’s emails again for the limited purpose of arguing whether the government should be permanently blocked from using them.
The post Justice Dept. says a court ruling is blocking efforts to reindict Comey appeared first on Washington Post.
