President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has once again hit former FBI Director James Comey with charges, claiming he gave information “relating to the national defense” to someone “not entitled to receive it.”
Federal prosecutors charged Comey with violating the Espionage Act by allegedly, “through one and more co-conspirators,” directing the disclosure of national defense information to New York Times reporter Charlie Savage for a story titled, “Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter.” The case has played out under seal since Oct. 5, exactly 10 years after the story was published, and was unsealed Monday.
“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 an unsealed filing. “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.”
The DOJ defended the move on social media while sharing the filing: “Filing a criminal information to toll the statute of limitations is a widely recognized practice in federal court and has been approved by multiple Circuit Courts of Appeals. This is an ongoing criminal investigation, and we will not comment further.”
Since the DOJ filed the charges through a criminal information without a grand jury, it must still bring the charges to a grand jury for an indictment.
Comey’s attorneys have argued that the case should be thrown out because the DOJ did not secure the indictment within the statute of limitations.
Comey has been a longtime target of Trump’s since launching the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election a decade ago. The president’s DOJ charged him last year with lying to Congress about authorizing leaks to the media. Comey pleaded not guilty, and the case was dismissed.
Comey was charged again earlier this year in a separate federal case with threatening Trump by posting a photograph of seashells arranged to show the numbers “86 47.” Comey also pleaded not guilty in that case, and said Monday he and his lawyers plan to fight the new charges.
“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,” he said in a video posted to Instagram. “Nothing’s changed with me — I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid of these people and I still believe in an independent federal judiciary.”
The complaint was unsealed the same day a judge ruled that Trump’s abrupt firing of Comey’s daughter as a federal prosecutor was unlawful. The news also came the same day that House Democrats released a report in which Trump was accused of raping a beauty pageant contestant in 1993.