Justice Dept Charges Comey a Third Time With Misusing National Defense Information
Seven Lights
The Justice Department charged former FBI Director James Comey on Monday with transmitting national defense information and conspiracy, a pair of counts that mark the third time the Trump administration has prosecuted him.
The two-page filing in Federal District Court in Washington alleges that Mr. Comey provided information to a national news outlet in 2016, in alleged conspiracy with a person whose identity was redacted. The document gave few details.
Patrick Fitzgerald, the Trump-appointed attorney who signed the filing, said in a statement that the charges “relate to a New York Times article that was published on October 5, 2016 — an incident that career prosecutors previously investigated and declined to prosecute.”
The charges were brought by information rather than a grand jury indictment, a procedure that allows prosecutors to file charges without first presenting evidence to a grand jury. A grand jury must still approve the case before it proceeds to trial. The filing appeared designed to get around a statute of limitations that Mr. Comey’s lawyers have argued has expired. In a court brief filed last week, his attorneys said the alleged conduct was twice investigated by the Justice Department’s inspector general and a previous Trump administration, without charges, and that the statute at issue requires an indictment, not an information.
President Trump fired Mr. Comey in 2017 during the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Comey went on to become one of the president’s most prominent critics, testifying to Congress that Mr. Trump had asked him to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The administration’s first prosecution of Mr. Comey collapsed last year, when a federal judge ruled that the hand-picked prosecutor who brought two false-statement charges had been unconstitutionally appointed. A separate case was opened earlier this year in North Carolina, where Mr. Comey posted a photograph of seashells spelling “8647” on a Cape Cod beach, an act interpreted by his supporters as an anti-Trump message and by the White House as a call for violence.
Monday’s charges extend the administration’s five-year confrontation with the man Mr. Trump called “a real character” when naming him FBI director in 2013. Prosecutors must now persuade a grand jury to endorse the case, the step that Mr. Comey’s legal team contends the government has deliberately avoided.