From the moment James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was charged with lying to and obstructing Congress, his lawyers have asserted that the prosecution was little more than an act of vindictive retribution fueled by President Trump’s longstanding animus against him.
On Wednesday morning, the lawyers are set to appear in court to make that argument and to persuade a federal judge that the case should be dismissed because the Justice Department effectively allowed itself to be taken captive by Mr. Trump’s desire to seek political revenge.
At a hearing in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., Mr. Comey’s legal team — led by his old friend and former federal prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald — are likely to recount the extraordinary story of how Mr. Trump strong-armed top department officials into charging Mr. Comey over a weekend in September.
It was then that the president, in an angry social media post, ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to prosecute Mr. Comey, one of his most reviled opponents. Those demands came shortly after Mr. Trump ousted the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who had refused to indict Mr. Comey, and just before he chose as his replacement an inexperienced loyalist who quickly filed an indictment in what turned out to be the first criminal case she had ever handled.
Motions for vindictive prosecution are generally recognized as being difficult to win. They require defendants to prove that prosecutors displayed a clear animus toward them while they were trying to exercise their rights, and that charges would never have been brought except for that animus.
But Mr. Comey’s lawyers are likely to have an easier time than most given that Mr. Trump has consistently attacked Mr. Comey since firing him as F.B.I. director in May 2017. At the time, Mr. Comey was overseeing an investigation into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared ever since that he should be prosecuted, referring to Mr. Comey with a litany of insults, such as “leaker,” “liar,” “untruthful slime ball,” “weasel” and “corrupt piece of garbage.”
The defense has also claimed that Mr. Trump’s animosity toward Mr. Comey runs “so deep” that it extended to his relatives, many of whom have showed up in court to support him. The lawyers have pointed out that in July the Justice Department fired Mr. Comey’s daughter, Maurene Comey, from her post as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan with “no justification.”
The prosecutors working for Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. attorney handpicked by Mr. Trump to secure an indictment in the case, have sought in court papers to play down the president’s demands that charges should be filed. Mr. Comey’s lawyers have described Mr. Trump’s orders to Ms. Bondi as “smoking-gun evidence” of vindictiveness, but the prosecutors have claimed that it was “hardly evidence at all” and merely part of “a mix of news reports, social-media posts and speculation” used to accuse the president of bias.
They have also argued that the indictment of Mr. Comey was not born out of spite or vengeance but was instead a legitimate means of seeking justice against “a former F.B.I. director who lied to Congress about his conduct while at the helm of the nation’s primary federal law-enforcement agency.”
The charges against Mr. Comey accuse him of perjury and obstruction stemming from testimony he provided in September 2020 to the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the hearing, he was asked about whether he had authorized anyone at the F.B.I. to serve as an anonymous source in newspaper articles about sensitive political investigations.
Mr. Comey’s vindictive prosecution claims will be heard by Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff, a Biden appointee, who will take the bench for the first time in the case to consider a major motion.
Other judges have already raised serious doubts about the way in which Ms. Halligan has handled the prosecution. On Monday, for example, William E. Fitzpatrick, the magistrate judge working under Judge Nachmanoff, issued an extraordinary ruling saying that Ms. Halligan had engaged in “a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” that could result in the charges against Mr. Comey being dismissed.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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