A federal judge has temporarily blocked prosecutors from accessing materials from a key ally of James Comey on Saturday, making the already uphill criminal case against the former FBI director even more difficult.
Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law school professor who has also represented Comey as an attorney, sued the government in November, saying that the government had unlawfully accessed materials from his computer as they charged Comey with lying to Congress. Richman is a close friend of Comey who worked at the FBI.
Prosecutors allege Comey lied to Congress about whether he authorized leaks and relied on private communications between Comey and Richman to support their case.
Comey has vehemently denied doing anything wrong – and a federal judge has dismissed the charges against him, ruling that the prosecutor handling the case was improperly appointed. The second Trump administration’s justice department is expected to try to re-indict Comey.
Between 2017 and 2020, as the government investigated Comey, it obtained multiple warrants allowing them to search an image of Richman’s computer. Neither Richman nor Comey were charged with a crime as part of that investigation, which closed in 2021. Even though the investigation was over, the government appears to have retained all of the information it obtained from Richman, not just what was responsive to the warrant, William Fitzpatrick, a magistrate judge overseeing the Comey case, wrote in a searing opinion in November.
As they conducted a new investigation into Comey this year, the government did not appear to obtain a new warrant to go through the materials it obtained from Richman, Fitzpatrick wrote. Instead, it conducted a warrantless search of the information earlier this year, allowing the government to potentially see materials protected by attorney-client privilege.
The government’s actions probably violated Richman’s protections from unreasonable searches under the US constitution’s fourth amendment, federal district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a four-page order on Saturday. Her order will remain in effect until 12 December.
The decision blocking access to Richman’s files comes as the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of Virginia – which is handling the prosecution of Comey – has faced a series of setbacks. On Thursday, prosecutors sought to obtain a new indictment against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, another political rival of Donald Trump that the president has targeted with specious allegations of mortgage fraud. In an extremely rare move, a federal grand jury in Virginia declined to approve the indictment.
