The Justice Department filed new criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey this week, the third time the Trump administration has brought a case against him since last year. A criminal information unsealed Monday in federal court in Washington charges Comey with two felony counts tied to the unauthorized transmission of national defense information and conspiracy, stemming from a 2016 New York Times article about the government's use of email surveillance.

Prosecutors allege that while serving as FBI director, Comey directed subordinates, through an intermediary, to share classified details with Times reporter Charlie Savage on or about Oct. 5, 2016, correcting an earlier Reuters account of the surveillance program. The filing itself does not name the alleged intermediary, referring only to an unidentified "Individual #1"; reporting has tied the renewed investigation to Daniel Richman, a Columbia law professor and longtime Comey adviser who was subpoenaed in August, though the document does not establish that the current charges grew out of that inquiry, and Richman's past acknowledgment of sharing a Comey memo with the Times concerned a separate episode from the 2016 Yahoo surveillance story. Richman has not been charged.

Fitzgerald noted that two earlier prosecution teams had investigated the same October 2016 Times article without bringing charges and said the new filing, never submitted to a grand jury, "purports to charge Mr. Comey with crimes that he did not commit," a case brought a little more than a year after Trump, who fired Comey as FBI director in May 2017, returned to office. Prosecutors filed the case as a criminal information rather than a grand jury indictment, on the Oct. 5, 2026 anniversary of the alleged disclosure, arguing that doing so tolled the Espionage Act's ten-year clock while the investigation continues; Comey's lawyers, noting that two earlier prosecution teams examined the same 2016 article and declined to bring charges, have moved to dismiss, arguing the statute requires an indictment within ten years and that a information does not satisfy that requirement. An earlier case accusing Comey of lying to Congress was dismissed, and a separate indictment in North Carolina over a social media post Trump described as a threat remains pending.

The filing came in the same week two other cases connected to the Comey family and to long-running Republican complaints about the FBI's handling of Hunter Biden also moved forward. Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, former officials on the FBI's now-disbanded Foreign Influence Task Force, were charged last Friday with lying to Congress about their knowledge of Hunter Biden's laptop during 2023 testimony. Prosecutors added obstruction charges in a superseding complaint filed overnight Tuesday, hours before a scheduled hearing; Floris's attorneys called the timing "outrageous government conduct" and asked the court to strike the filing.

Separately, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled Monday that the Justice Department's July 2025 firing of Maurene Comey, James Comey's daughter and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who worked on the Jeffrey Epstein and Sean "Diddy" Combs cases, was unlawful. Furman ordered her retroactively reinstated with back pay through December 2025, finding the dismissal violated civil service protections and separation-of-powers principles.

References

1. 1.Axios — reported the new charges against Comey, the two counts, and background on the 2016 Times article.
2. 2.The Federalist — reported details of the alleged Oct. 5, 2016 disclosure and the Espionage Act counts.
3. 3.CBS News / Yahoo News — reported Fitzgerald's statement and the statute of limitations defense argument.
4. 4.Washington Post — confirmed this is the third Comey prosecution and detailed the North Carolina and prior dismissed cases.
5. 5.CBS News, NBC News, Daily Wire — identified Daniel Richman as the person named in filings as the alleged leak conduit.
6. 6.NPR, CNN, Al Jazeera — reported the charges against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides over Hunter Biden laptop testimony.
7. 7.CNBC — reported the superseding obstruction complaint and the 'outrageous government conduct' quote from Floris's lawyers.
8. 8.Washington Times — reported Kash Patel's comments on the Floris and Benavides arrests.
9. 9.CBS News, Washington Post, CNBC, NPR, NBC News, Daily Caller — reported Judge Jesse Furman's ruling on Maurene Comey's firing and reinstatement order.