A federal judge ordered prosecutors to turn all grand jury materials in the case against former FBI Director James Comey to his legal team Monday, writing that “government misconduct may have tainted the grand jury proceedings.”
In a 24-page ruling, US Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick gave the feds until close of business to hand over audio recordings of the grand jury proceedings to the defense as well as all grand jury materials filed under seal, suggesting that the Justice Department flouted the principle of attorney-client privilege to secure an indictment of President Trump’s longtime nemesis.
In his order, Fitzpatrick took issue with investigators’ handling of four search warrants executed by the FBI in 2019 and 2020 as part of the bureau’s Arctic Haze probe into how classified information from the bureau was leaked to news outlets.
The warrants targeted Comey’s friend and lawyer Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School, and sought information from his iPhone, iPad, iCloud account and hard drive. Fitzpatrick found that while the government allowed Columbia, Richman and his attorney to identify privileged content in what they found, they “never engaged Mr. Comey in this process even though it knew that Mr. Richman represented Mr. Comey as his attorney as of May 9, 2017, and three of the four Richman Warrants authorized the government to search Mr. Richman’s devices through May 30, 2017, 21 days after an attorney-client relationship had been formed.”
The judge also noted that while the DOJ “was permitted to search all of the Richman materials but authorized to seize only evidence related to violations” of laws forbidding theft of government property and retention of national security information, “both markedly different offenses than those with which Mr. Comey is currently charged.”
Comey, 64, was indicted Sept. 25 on charges of lying to Congress and obstruction of justice in connection with September 2020 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia considered and rejected an additional count against the lawman.
“The government’s position that privileged materials were not directly shared with the grand jurors ignores the equally unacceptable prospect that privileged materials were used to shape the government’s presentation and therefore improperly inform the grand jurors’ deliberations,” Fitzpatrick wrote.
