Former FBI Director James B. Comey has been criminally charged for the third time by the Justice Department, this time on accusations that he leaked a sensitive national security document, according to a court filing unsealed Monday.
Few details were available in the court filing, but Mr. Comey is accused of leaking the document when he was the FBI director in October 2016.
The charges were filed against Mr. Comey in the District of Columbia on Oct. 5, a decade after the alleged distribution of the document.
People were interested in these podcasts
Mr. Comey is also charged with conspiring with others to violate the law prohibiting the sharing of sensitive national security documents.
The former FBI chief, who was fired by President Trump in May 2017, professed his innocence in a video posted Monday.
“Well, they’re back again. It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to,” Mr. Comey said in the video, posted on social media after the charges were made public.
“Nothing’s changed with me. I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid of these people, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary,” he said.
The charges that were filed are a criminal information, which is a charge filed by prosecutors, not a grand jury indictment. In the filing, the Justice Department said the move is to buy time before the statute of limitations expires.
“The Department filed a waiverless criminal information to toll the statute of limitations as it relates to allegations concerning former FBI Director Comey,” prosecutors wrote, adding that the case is “an ongoing criminal investigation.”
In an Oct. 20 filing, Mr. Comey’s attorneys moved to dismiss the case, arguing that an indictment must be filed within 10 years and that a criminal information does not suffice. They said the case is “time-barred” because the government did not obtain a grand jury indictment after Oct. 5, 2016, when the alleged crime occurred.
“An indictment fundamentally differs from an information,” his attorneys wrote.
The new charges arise from an Oct. 5, 2016, article in The New York Times that blared the headline, “Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter,” written by reporters Charlie Savage and Nicole Perlroth.
“The United States’ investigation has uncovered evidence that former FBI Director, James B. Comey, sought to correct misinformation which had appeared in the press by way of Reuters the day before,” Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Dustin Farahnak wrote in the filing unsealed Monday.
“The investigation has uncovered evidence that Mr. Comey directed staff to speak to Mr. Savage about specific accuracy concerns related to the Reuters article, and thereby illegally transferred classified information.”
Mr. Comey was the FBI director when the Times article was published.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for Mr. Comey to be prosecuted, referring to him as “a dirty cop” and a “sick person.” The former FBI director launched an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and into alleged links between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Since Mr. Trump returned to the White House, Mr. Comey has been charged three times in federal criminal cases.
The first case, filed in Virginia, charged Mr. Comey with making false statements and obstructing a congressional procedure during his September 2020 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding anonymous press sourcing. A federal judge dismissed the indictment after ruling that the interim U.S. attorney who filed the charges was unlawfully appointed. The Justice Department has appealed.
The second case, filed in North Carolina, accused Mr. Comey of making a threat via a social media post featuring a photo of seashells arranged to spell “86 47,” which the Justice Department said was an assassination threat against Mr. Trump, because he is the 47th president and “86” is sometimes a slang term meaning “to get rid of.”
Mr. Comey has maintained his innocence in that case, which is still ongoing.
Patrick Fitzgerald, Mr. Comey’s attorney, said the most recent charges involve two different teams of prosecutors that investigated the allegations during the first Trump administration.
“Both times, the government determined that no charges should be brought against anyone. Now 10 years after the article was published, the government filed an ’information’ against Mr. Comey that was not approved by a judge nor issued by a grand jury and ’purports to charge Mr. Comey with a crime that he did not commit.’
“Mr. Comey will fight these charges vigorously and in the open,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.