Former FBI Director James Comey has been charged with a federal crime for the third time since President Donald Trump returned to office, in a case unsealed in Washington on Monday that accuses him of leaking national defense information to a reporter in October 2016, days before the presidential election he would later be fired in the middle of investigating. Prosecutors say Comey, while running the FBI, caused classified information to be passed to the press through intermediaries. Comey says he is innocent, and his lawyers are already asking a judge to throw the case out before it starts.
The charging document is a criminal information filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and it carries two counts under the Espionage Act. The first charges Comey with transmitting national defense information — that on or about October 5, 2016, while lawfully in possession of information relating to the national defense, he knowingly and willfully caused it to be transmitted to a person who was not entitled to receive it. The second charges him with conspiring with others to do the same, in a conspiracy prosecutors say began no later than October 4, 2016. The single concrete act the filing describes is this: on October 5, 2016, Comey, acting through one or more co-conspirators, directed a person to disclose national defense information to a reporter for a national news publication.
What the case is about, according to the filing and Comey's own lawyer, is a newspaper article that has already been investigated twice. On October 4, 2016, a wire report revealed that Yahoo had adapted its spam filter to secretly scan customers' incoming emails at the direction of American intelligence agencies. Prosecutors allege that Comey then directed people acting for him to speak to New York Times reporter Charlie Savage about what the FBI saw as accuracy problems in that report, and that classified national defense information changed hands in the process. The resulting Times article, on Yahoo's cooperation with U.S. email surveillance, was published on October 5, 2016. By the prosecution's own account in the filing, Comey's purpose in causing the disclosure was to correct misinformation in the press. His lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, makes the same identification of the article — and then turns it against the government: two separate teams of prosecutors investigated that very article during Trump's first administration, Fitzgerald says, and both declined to bring charges.
The way the case was brought is already a fight of its own. This is not a grand jury indictment. Prosecutors filed the information under seal on October 5, 2026 — exactly ten years after the alleged leak — and the Justice Department says plainly why: "The Department filed a waiverless criminal information to toll the statute of limitations as it relates to allegations concerning former FBI Director Comey," the department said, calling that a widely recognized practice approved by multiple appeals courts, and adding that the investigation is ongoing and it will not comment further. The department says it is still seeking to take the case to a grand jury for a real indictment. The document is signed by senior Justice Department officials and three special assistant U.S. attorneys, and the case was unsealed on Monday by U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden. If Comey is convicted, the filing also asks for forfeiture of anything derived from the alleged offenses.
Comey's lawyers moved to kill the case while it was still under seal. Their argument is that the ten-year clock for an Espionage Act charge of this kind ran out, and that prosecutors cannot stop that clock with a piece of paper no grand jury ever voted on. "An indictment fundamentally differs from an information," his lawyers said in their court filing. A judge will now decide whether this case exists at all before anyone argues about whether a leak happened.
This is the third prosecution of Comey in Trump's second term, and the first two explain the ground this one is fought on. In September 2025, Comey was indicted in Virginia on charges of making a false statement and obstructing a congressional proceeding over testimony he gave Congress. That case was brought by a prosecutor installed after Trump replaced a U.S. attorney who had expressed misgivings about charging him, and a federal judge later dismissed it after finding the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed; the Justice Department has appealed. Then, in April of this year, the department charged Comey in North Carolina over a social media post showing seashells arranged to form the numbers "86 47," which prosecutors allege was a threat against the president. Comey has said he understood the image as a political message and did not intend violence. That case is still pending. Trump fired Comey as FBI director in 2017, has attacked him in public for years and has repeatedly demanded his prosecution. Comey's lawyers argue the cases are improperly motivated by that hostility. The Justice Department denies its prosecutions are politically driven.
Comey answered the new charge on camera on Monday, in a video he posted online, and he did not treat it as a surprise. "They're back again," he said. "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 ended where he has ended every one of these: "I'm still innocent."
His lawyer backed him with the record of the decade this case reaches back into. Fitzgerald said Comey "steadfastly maintains his innocence" and intends to fight the charges, and he pointed to the fact that the article now at the center of a federal case was picked over by two teams of prosecutors during Trump's first term — including a dedicated leak investigation run by a U.S. attorney and postal inspectors, opened after a criminal referral and aimed squarely at how that October 2016 article came to be written. Those investigators reported their conclusion that a senior FBI lawyer had been a source for the article and believed he was acting on authorization passed down from Comey through his chief of staff. Even with that in hand, prosecutors declined to charge anyone, and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington formally declined the case. What changed between then and now, Comey's side argues, is not the evidence but the president: the same disclosure that career prosecutors twice refused to charge became a felony case in the second term of a president who has called Comey one of the worst human beings the country has ever been exposed to and has said publicly that he should be prosecuted.
For now, the charges remain allegations, and the first battle is the calendar. If the judge agrees with Comey that only an indictment filed within ten years could have saved this case, it ends where the Virginia case ended — dismissed on the lawfulness of how it was brought, without a jury ever hearing whether national defense information reached a reporter in October 2016 and who sent it there. If the judge lets it stand, the Justice Department still has to persuade a grand jury to indict, and then prove, ten years on, that correcting the record about the government's own email surveillance program was a crime.
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