A federal judge ruled Friday that the Justice Department unlawfully accessed evidence central to its case against former FBI director James B. Comey, delivering what could be a death blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to reindict one of his most prominent perceived rivals.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the FBI to return emails and other electronic communications it seized from Comey confidant Daniel Richman roughly five years ago as part of a separate investigation that did not result in charges.
Those records had formed the backbone of the case the Justice Department filed against Comey in September, and without them prosecutors maintained they were “effectively enjoined … from investigating or prosecuting Comey.”
Kollar-Kotelly faulted authorities for failing to obtain new search warrants before using the old Richman material as part of the Comey investigation. She described that lapse as a fundamental violation of Richman’s rights.
“When the Government violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures by sweeping up a broad swath of a person’s electronic files, retaining those files long after the relevant investigation has ended, and later sifting through those files without a warrant to obtain evidence against someone else, what remedy is available to the victim of the Government’s unlawful intrusion?” she wrote.
The judge last week issued a temporary order barring the Justice Department’s access to the material it had seized from Richman, a Columbia law school professor who briefly represented Comey as an attorney after he was fired as FBI director in 2017. Her order Friday made that provisional decision permanent.
The judge left open the possibility that investigators could legally re-obtain the seized communications. She instructed agents to make a copy of the files before returning them to Richman that would be placed under court seal, making them accessible should the government obtain a valid search warrant to use them in the Comey case.
Whether the Justice Department could succeed in obtaining such a warrant, though, remains in doubt. Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling is the latest roadblock Justice Department lawyers are facing in their efforts to reindict Comey on charges he lied to Congress during testimony in September 2020.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not return requests for comment on the ruling or how the decision might affect its plans.
Prosecutors allege Comey failed to acknowledge that he’d authorized Richman to leak confidential information to the news media when he was questioned about it during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Comey has denied the accusation and vowed to take the case to trial.
But before a jury could rule on the substance of that case, a federal judge dismissed the indictment on the grounds that the prosecutor who obtained it — Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — had been unlawfully appointed and had no legal authority when she presented the case to a grand jury.
That decision also led to the dismissal of a separate mortgage fraud indictment Halligan had obtained against New York Attorney General Letitia James, another of Trump’s political opponents. Halligan’s office has twice sought to revive its case against James in the weeks since. Both times grand juries have declined to return an indictment.
In Comey’s case, the judge suggested any effort to recharge him could be further 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 just days before that five-year deadline was set to expire.
Despite those obstacles, the Justice Department’s efforts this week to defend its continued access to the Richman material suggested officials hoped to mount a new case against Comey.
The FBI originally obtained the emails and text messages at issue under search warrants issued in 2019 and 2020 as part of an inquiry into whether Comey had used Richman as a conduit to illegally disclose sensitive information on the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. That investigation was later closed without charges.
Richman had argued that investigators in that first probe had seized more of his messages than the initial warrants allowed and that prosecutor’s use of them in the Comey case was illegal.
A U.S. magistrate judge who had overseen aspects of the case against Comey, William E. Fitzpatrick, had also questioned the use of Richman’s communications in the grand jury presentation that led to the FBI director’s indictment. He, too, criticized prosecutors for not first obtaining a warrant — one instance of what Fitzpatrick described as a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” and possible misconduct.
Kollar-Kotelly echoed that concern in her ruling Friday.
“The Government has presented no substantive argument that its warrantless search of … Richman’s files in 2025 was consistent with his Fourth Amendment rights, and its decision to do so is flatly inconsistent with precedent and long-standing practice,” she wrote.
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