Judge warns DOJ he'd be ‘extremely frustrated' if it raids James Comey's home
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden on Friday warned the Justice Department about taking law enforcement action targeting former FBI Director James Comey after the Trump administration brought a third criminal case against the longtime Trump target using a rare charging mechanism.
“I will be extremely frustrated if there is some sort of predawn raid or black pajamas” outside Comey’s home, McFadden said.
The federal prosecutor on the case, Dustin Farahnak, tried to allay his concerns.
“We’re not going to do anything that will offend the court,” he said.
Comey attorney Ephraim McDowell said that the FBI was outside his client’s home. The former director 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.
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 Oct. 5, exactly 10 years after a story ran in the 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.
It 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.
The judge did not ban the government from trying to bring the most recent case before a federal grand jury, saying that was the government’s choice. D.C. grand jurors have been skeptical of politically-tainted cases against Trump’s professed enemies.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration failed to secure an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a star witness for the Jan. 6 committee. The Trump administration also failed to indict six sitting members of Congress earlier this year over a social media video Trump disfavored.
Comey’s lawyers had asked the judge to dismiss the case entirely. If the grand jury rejects a case against Comey, McDowell said, the government could keep going back to try to seek an indictment. “All this time, Mr. Comey would be sitting here.”
Referencing the string of no bills, McFadden said that grand juries can do surprising things, but that if the grand jury refused to indict him, all of these proceedings will have been an exercise in futility.
“Ham sandwiches are harder to indict these days,” McFadden joked, to laughter in the courtroom.
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 the former FBI director 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.
Legal experts questioned the mechanism that government attorneys used to bring the most recent case.
“They brought the case in such a way that undermines their complaint in the first place,” former federal prosecutor Sarah Krissoff said. “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.”
She 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.”
McFadden ordered the case unsealed Monday and set a hearing for Friday on Comey’s motion to dismiss.
The Comey hearing came at the end of a week focused on political cases in federal court in Washington, where a federal grand jury rejected the Hutchinson case. 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.”
Farahnak, is a special U.S. attorney working under acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter and Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, both Trump appointees. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, headed by Jeanine Pirro, is not involved in the latest Comey prosecution.
Gary Grumbach contributed.
Ver nota original ↗
¿Querés un resumen rápido de esta noticia, hecho por nuestra IA?
