James Comey’s friend and former attorney Daniel Richman is suing the Justice Department, alleging that evidence he collected years ago was used in the recently dismissed criminal case against Comey, potentially upsetting the Trump administration’s upcoming plans to re-indict the former FBI director.
Evidence gathered by the Justice Department in 2019 and 2020 when it collected Richman’s online accounts, iPhones, iPads and hard drives was becoming a serious issue in the criminal case against Comey in Northern Virginia, which was dismissed last month.
Richman, a Columbia University law professor, is asking a federal court in Washington, D.C., to issue an emergency order to the Justice Department to halt access to Richman’s files and hold a hearing on whether the Justice Department violated Richman’s constitutional rights.
He said the Justice Department’s continued access to his files showed a “callous disregard” for his Fourth Amendment rights, which protect him from unfair searches and government seizures.
“The government has no legal basis to retain any images of Professor Richman’s computer, whether stored on a hard drive or elsewhere,” his lawsuit states. “The government’s actions deprive Professor Richman of his constitutional rights, and the harm to Professor Richman will continue if his property is not returned.”
Richman’s new request in court now creates the possibility that a judge could dig deeper into allegations of prosecutorial missteps that were not fully exposed or prosecuted in Comey’s case before they were dismissed last Monday, or block evidence that prosecutors might want to use when trying to restate the allegations against Comey related to his 2020 congressional testimony.
District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the District of Columbia, a jurist experienced in national security cases and a Bill Clinton appointee, has not yet responded to Richman’s lawsuit, according to court records. The Justice Department also did not respond. Court records of the original search warrant sought years ago by the Justice Department to obtain Richman’s email, iCloud and other accounts and other data also remain sealed in the D.C. District Court.
In many ways, Richman’s lawsuit picks up where it left off before Comey’s case was dismissed.
Comey’s team had been arguing that the Justice Department and FBI mishandled evidence and their grand jury presentations before delivering an indictment against the former FBI director in late September. President Donald Trump has publicly said he wants the Justice Department to indict Comey, and the indictment comes just days before the possibility of federal charges is due.
Comey pleaded not guilty before the charges were dismissed. The indictment alleges that he misled Congress about his interactions with Richman in 2020, and a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, heard evidence from Richman’s file, according to court records.
A federal magistrate judge in Virginia wrote last month that the Justice Department’s use of years of evidence from Richman before the Comey grand jury this year “showed an arrogant attitude toward fundamental Fourth Amendment principles” and that prosecutors were ultimately able to “recover all the information they had from Mr. Richman and, apparently, in the government’s view, they could do so again at any time.”
Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick said the original search warrant in a defense leak investigation called “Arctic Haze” did not authorize federal investigators to obtain evidence related to the crime for which Comey was ultimately charged: that Comey lied to Congress in his 2020 testimony.
Fitzpatrick also noted that Richman’s evidence had also been withheld for years, and the Justice Department had not received new authorization this year to retake it to investigate Comey. Additionally, the magistrate judge raised questions about the Justice Department’s failure to put in place appropriate procedures to sift through evidence to filter out potentially confidential discussions between attorneys and their clients — in this case, Comey, a client of Richman and others years earlier. Comey’s team said they never obtained the evidence before he was charged.
The Arctic haze investigation never resulted in a criminal case, and Richman was never charged.
“Despite the decisive conclusion of the Arctic Haze investigation in 2021, the government has incontrovertibly retained Professor Richman’s files to this day,” Richman’s attorneys wrote in a new lawsuit recently filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. They added that the Justice Department’s handling of the evidence “epitomizes the very government abuses the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect.”
Comey’s criminal case ended abruptly when another judge ruled that Trump-backed lawyer Lindsey Halligan did not have prosecutorial powers at the time. Lindsay Halligan has been serving as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and presented the case to the grand jury in late September.
The dismissal largely cuts off the defense team’s ability to probe the investigative methods of Harrigan and investigators because the criminal case ended before Comey’s team had access to his grand jury transcripts and before he formally challenged the use of evidence in the case. The Justice Department said it plans to appeal the decision that invalidated Halligan’s job, but that appeal has not yet been filed. A grand jury event will likely occur first as the Justice Department attempts to obtain new indictments.
If a judge in federal court in Washington, D.C., doesn’t stop the Justice Department from touching Richman’s evidence again, Richman’s team will ask the court to hear testimony and other information “to determine the precise contours of the government’s actions, why it was done, and whether it constituted callous or willful misconduct.”
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