Justice Dept. Brings More Charges Against Comey, Accusing Him of Leaks
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Federal prosecutors have brought new charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, accusing him of mishandling national security information in October 2016 that they said ended up in a New York Times article, according to court papers unsealed on Monday.
The case highlights the extraordinary effort President Trump’s Justice Department has expended in pursuing Mr. Comey, one of the president’s most favored targets for retribution. It is the third time in 13 months that the Trump administration has sought to prosecute Mr. Comey, whom Mr. Trump fired as F.B.I. director in 2017.
The charges came in the form of a criminal information filed in Federal District Court in Washington earlier this month, the court records say. A criminal information is a way to file criminal charges without immediately seeking approval from either a judge or a grand jury to do so. In a video posted online, Mr. Comey vowed to fight the charges.
“I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid of these people,” he said. The new case against him, he said, “would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to.”
Court papers in the case point to an Oct. 5 article, which described a novel use of surveillance authority involving Yahoo emails. The article described how a system intended to scan emails for child pornography and spam was used by the company to help satisfy a secret court order requiring it to search for messages containing a computer “signature” tied to the communications of a state-sponsored terrorist organization, citing several people familiar with the matter.
The Justice Department obtained an individualized order from a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and Yahoo was barred from disclosing the matter, the article said.
Prosecutors defended the new charges against Mr. Comey by saying in court papers that the Times article came about because Mr. Comey “sought to correct misinformation which had appeared in the press by way of Reuters the day before.” The investigation, the prosecutors said, “uncovered evidence that Mr. Comey directed staff to speak to” The New York Times “about specific accuracy concerns related to the Reuters article, and thereby illegally transferred classified information.”
The Justice Department has had a spotty record to date in its pursuit of Mr. Comey. It secured an indictment against him in September 2025, accusing him of lying over years-old testimony to Congress. The charges were later thrown out by a judge.
A second case in North Carolina is set to go to trial next year, after prosecutors in Virginia rejected the case, which centers on a photograph of seashells on beach that Mr. Comey shared to social media last year. The shells were arranged to say “86 47,” which prosecutors deemed a threat against Mr. Trump.
In an unusual twist, the new charges were unsealed hours after a federal judge in New York ruled that the Trump administration had unlawfully fired his daughter, Maurene Comey, from her job as a prosecutor in that city. The Trump administration, the judge found, had acted in violation of the Constitution and federal law when it claimed that executive authority gave the president wide latitude to fire civil servants.
That ruling, if confirmed by higher courts, could have sweeping consequences for an administration that has fired hundreds of federal law enforcement officials, purging the ranks of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. of people who worked on investigations and prosecutions related to Mr. Trump and his allies.
Tags
Who is online
86 visitors
Sir Comey has entered the Benghazi Zone ... beeping Starlink express passes overhead.
Maybe this is Trumps "October Surprise"