Comey's Lawyers Ask Judge to Block Third Criminal Case
Lawyers for former FBI director James Comey will ask a federal judge on Friday, Oct. 30, 2026, to block the Justice Department from pursuing a third criminal case against him, The Guardian reported.
The new case concerns a disclosure to the news media that is more than a decade old. Court documents unsealed on Monday showed that the Trump administration bypassed a grand jury, a panel of citizens that decides whether evidence supports criminal charges. Instead, it filed a charging document known as a criminal information, which prosecutors can file without an indictment from a grand jury.
The allegation centres on an October 2016 New York Times story about a secret court order that required Yahoo to scan emails for messages potentially linked to a foreign terrorist organization. Federal authorities, including prosecutor John Durham, began investigating that disclosure in early 2017. Comey's attorneys say in a court filing that Durham wrote a classified memo in December 2018 recommending that no criminal charges be brought against anyone in connection with the disclosure.
The Justice Department has defended the filing as an effort to extend the legal time limit, known as the statute of limitations, for seeking a grand jury indictment. Comey's lawyers have called the leak case legally invalid and say he is innocent of the allegations.
The judge expected to hear arguments is Trevor McFadden of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump appointed McFadden to the bench.
Comey already faces other charges. A first criminal case, filed in federal court in Virginia, accused him of lying to Congress in 2020. A judge dismissed that case after concluding that the prosecutor who brought the charges had been illegally appointed. A separate pending indictment charges Comey with threatening Trump through an Instagram post showing seashells arranged as "86 47".
Comey was appointed FBI director in 2013 by Barack Obama, and he held the post when Trump first took office. An earlier investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general found in 2019 that Comey had violated applicable policies and his FBI Employment Agreement by providing one of the unclassified memos, according to the inspector general's report.
