Lawsuit from James Comey’s friend could disrupt plans to re-indict the former FBI director

Lawsuit from James Comey’s friend could disrupt plans to re-indict the former FBI director

Katelyn Polantz, CNN

Tue, December 2, 2025 at 6:13 PM UTC

5 min read

Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 8, 2017. - Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images/File

James Comey’s friend and former lawyer Daniel Richman is suing the Justice Department over evidence gathered from him years ago that was used in the recently dismissed criminal case against Comey, which could disrupt the Trump administration’s imminent plans to re-indict the former FBI director.

The evidence the Justice Department gathered from collecting Richman’s online accounts, iPhone, iPad and a hard drive in 2019 and 2020 was becoming a serious issue in criminal case against Comey in Northern Virginia that was dismissed last month.

Richman, a Columbia University law professor, is asking the federal court based in Washington, DC, to issue an emergency order for the Justice Department to stop accessing Richman’s files and hold a hearing on whether the Justice Department violated Richman’s constitutional rights.

He says the Justice Department still having access to his files is a “callous disregard” of his Fourth Amendment rights protecting against unfair searches and government seizures.

“There is no lawful basis for the government to retain any images of Professor Richman’s computer, whether stored on the Hard Drive or elsewhere,” his lawsuit says. “The government’s conduct has deprived Professor Richman of his constitutional rights, and the injury to Professor Richman will continue if his property is not returned.”

Richman’s new requests in court now create the possibility that a judge could further dig into the allegations of prosecutorial missteps, which were not fully exposed or litigated in the Comey case before it was dismissed last Monday, or close off evidence prosecutors may want to use as they try to refashion charges against Comey related to his 2020 congressional testimony.

DC District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an experienced jurist on national security cases and a Bill Clinton appointee, hasn’t yet responded to Richman’s lawsuit, according to the court record. The Justice Department has also not responded. The original search court records from years ago, where the Justice Department sought warrants to obtain Richman’s email, iCloud and other accounts and other data, are also still under seal in the DC District Court.

In many ways, Richman’s lawsuit picks up where Comey’s case left off before its dismissal.

Comey’s team had been gaining ground with arguments the Justice Department and FBI mishandled evidence and its grand jury presentation before handing up the indictment of the former FBI director in late September. President Donald Trump publicly said he wanted the Justice Department to prosecute Comey, and the indictment came days before the possibility of federal charges expired.

Comey had pleaded not guilty before the charges were dismissed. The indictment alleged he had misled Congress in 2020 on his interactions with Richman, and the Alexandria, Virginia, grand jury heard evidence from the Richman files, according to court records.

A federal magistrate judge in Virginia wrote last month that the Justice Department, in the use of years-old evidence from Richman before Comey’s grand jury this year, had a “cavalier attitude towards a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment” and that prosecutors ultimately were able to “rummage through all of the information seized from Mr. Richman, and apparently, in the government’s eyes, to do so again anytime they chose.”

The original search warrants, for a national defense leak investigation called Arctic Haze, didn’t authorize federal investigators to seize evidence related to the crimes Comey was ultimately charged with, of lying to Congress in 2020 testimony, the magistrate judge William Fitzpatrick said.

The evidence from Richman also sat dormant for years, and the Justice Department hadn’t obtained new warrants to access it again for investigating Comey this year, Fitzpatrick also noted. Additionally, the magistrate judge took issue with the Justice Department not putting the evidence through a proper process to filter out potentially confidential discussions between attorneys and their clients — in this case, with Comey as the client of Richman and others years ago. Comey’s team said they had never had access to the evidence before he was charged.

The Arctic Haze investigation never resulted in a criminal case, and Richman has never been charged.

“Although the Arctic Haze investigation decisively concluded in 2021, the government to this day indefensibly retains Professor Richman’s Files,” Richman’s lawyers wrote in the new lawsuit in their recent DC District Court filing. The Justice Department’s approach to the evidence, they add, “exemplifies precisely the governmental abuse against which the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect.”

The Comey criminal case ended abruptly last with a separate judge’s ruling that Trump-backed lawyer Lindsey Halligan, who had been acting as the US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and solely presented the case to the grand jury in late September, didn’t have prosecutor powers at that time.

The dismissal largely cut off the possibility of the defense team’s probe into Halligan and investigators’ approach because the criminal case was closed before Comey’s team got access to his grand jury records and before he could formally challenge the use of evidence in the case. The Justice Department has said it planned to appeal the decision voiding Halligan’s work, though that appeal hasn’t been filed. Grand jury activity where the Justice Department attempts to secure a new indictment could come first.

If the judge in DC’s federal court doesn’t stop the Justice Department from touching the Richman evidence again, Richman’s team asks for the court to hear testimony and other information “to determine the precise contours of the government’s conduct, why it did it, and whether that constitutes callous disregard or intentional misconduct.”

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