James Comey’s team in court seeking to toss out third DOJ case against longtime Trump foe

WASHINGTON — Attorneys for former FBI Director James Comey will be in court Friday seeking to toss out the third federal criminal case the Trump administration has brought against him in the past 13 months.

Comey, who has long been a target of Donald Trump’s since the president fired him nearly a decade ago, is facing a case involving two alleged crimes that date back to 2016. His attorneys contend there’s no valid case against him: The government didn’t secure an indictment from a grand jury before the statute of limitations of 10 years expired.

It was the third case against Comey since September 2025, when a Trump-aligned attorney convinced a federal grand jury to return an indictment against Comey in the Eastern District of Virginia. That case was later tossed because the attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was found to have been unlawfully acting as a federal prosecutor.

Then came the seashells case: A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina indicted Comey over an Instagram photo he posted with seashells arranged to spell out “8647,” which prosecutors contended was a threat against the president. Comey’s team has moved to dismiss that case on several grounds and says the picture was clearly not intended as a threat. The term “86” is widely known in the restaurant world to mean the kitchen is out of a dish. A federal judge has not yet ruled and knocked back the trial until 2027.

The latest case centers on the allegation that Comey, while FBI director in October 2016, authorized his staff to speak to a New York Times reporter to correct the record about another report that dealt with classified information.

The case was brought under seal on Oct. 5, exactly 10 years after a story ran in The New York Times that discussed how Yahoo had been complying with a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that led to the systematic scanning of email traffic from users of its email service.

The case against Comey was not the result of a grand jury indictment or a criminal complaint evaluated by a judge, but rather through a criminal information filed directly by the government, with no judge sign-off. Comey’s team believed that the government intended to secure an arrest warrant and execute an after-hours arrest on the Friday before Columbus Day weekend to ensure Comey sat in jail over a long holiday weekend.

Legal experts questioned the mechanism that government attorneys used to bring the case.

“They brought the case in such a way that undermines their complaint in the first place,” said former federal prosecutor Sarah Krissoff. “If they had a case, then they should have written out the charges in a complaint and gotten a judge to sign it, or they could have presented it to a grand jury.”

Krissoff called the Justice Department’s handling of the situation “disturbing.”

“Somebody is dictating this process, saying, ‘Bring the case,’” Krissoff said. “The case is going to go nowhere.”

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden ordered the case unsealed Monday and set a hearing for Friday on Comey’s motion to dismiss.

The Comey hearing comes at the end of a week focused on political cases in federal court in Washington, where a federal grand jury rejected the Trump administration’s attempts to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness for the House Jan. 6 committee. Separately, a federal magistrate judge held days of hearings to examine the validity of charges brought by criminal complaint against two former FBI employees who had been targeted by Trump allies on Capitol Hill.

“We have grand juries that are holding tight to the rule of law and actually asking questions most likely and requiring real evidence to be presented to them,” Krissoff said. “As a citizen, I’m sitting here saying, ‘Thank goodness for the federal judiciary,’ because they’re holding our country together, in my view.”