THE WASHINGTON POST: Ex-FBI chief James Comey pleads not guilty in false statements case

Former FBI director James B. Comey pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges that he lied to Congress in a case that has roiled the Justice Department and prompted alarm about its independence from the White House.

Defence attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald entered the plea on Mr Comey’s behalf during a brief arraignment before US District Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff in Alexandria, Virginia. President Donald Trump demanded prosecutors pursue the case, despite long-standing concerns within the Justice Department that the evidence was insufficient.

The judge scheduled the trial to begin January 5, but Mr Fitzgerald said Mr Comey’s defence team plans to file a series of motions by the end of the year seeking to dismiss the case on the grounds that it constitutes a vindictive prosecution; that the grand jury process used to indict Mr Comey had been abused; that the government had exhibited outrageous conduct; and that the interim US attorney Mr Trump installed with directions to charge Mr Comey, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally appointed.

“It’s the honour of my life to represent Mr Comey in this matter,” Mr Fitzgerald said, adding, “This prosecution is brought at the direction of President Trump.”

Mr Comey briefly addressed the judge, confirming that he understood his constitutional rights to remain silent and to be represented by counsel. His wife, Patrice Failor, and a daughter, Maurene Comey, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who was fired in July, were in the packed courtroom gallery for the arraignment, along with Mr Comey’s son-in-law, Troy A. Edwards Jr., a former supervisor in the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia who resigned after the indictment.

Onlookers outside the courthouse - some camped out in lawn chairs - began lining up before dawn Wednesday. Some carried signs reading “Show Trial,” “Trumped Up Charges!” and “This is the Weaponization of Government.”

A two-page indictment charges Mr Comey with one count of making false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020, when he denied authorizing leaks to the news media, and one count of obstructing the same congressional proceeding.

Mr Trump for years has blamed Mr Comey for the FBI’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, which consumed much of the President’s first term. On the campaign trail last year, Mr Trump vowed to seek retribution against the law enforcement officials who had investigated him. The Justice Department has opened several criminal investigations into the President’s perceived political foes in what legal experts and retired judges have described as an unprecedented attack on the rule of law.

Mr Comey is the first former senior government official to be charged as part of Mr Trump’s effort. But the case against the former FBI director has been fraught for years. Prosecutors investigating his responses to the Judiciary Committee repeatedly ruled out criminal charges because of insufficient evidence that he had testified falsely.

In a video message responding to his indictment last month, Mr Comey vowed to prove his innocence at trial.

“I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not, either,” he said, adding, “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system.”

In court Wednesday, Mr Fitzgerald gave a preview of the defence team’s multipronged effort to have the indictment dismissed before trial, describing it as a vindictive abuse of power directed by the President.

Legal experts have said Mr Comey could make a strong case for tossing the charges, because of Mr Trump’s unusual role directing prosecutors and his disparaging commentary about the former FBI director. Judge Nachmanoff indicated he would rule on Mr Comey’s motions by the end of the year.

The legal deadline to charge Mr Comey over his 2020 testimony was days away when Mr Trump ousted Erik S. Siebert, the US attorney he had appointed this year in the Eastern District of Virginia, and replaced him with Ms Halligan, a White House aide with no experience as a prosecutor. Mr Siebert had declined to prosecute Mr Comey after the allegations were reinvestigated this year by career prosecutors in the Eastern District office.

Those prosecutors laid out their reasoning in a formal declination memo. It cited an earlier decision not to charge Mr Comey by a special counsel appointed during Trump’s first term, John Durham, who had investigated the same Senate testimony, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals.

One of the motions Fitzgerald previewed would challenge Ms Halligan’s appointment as US attorney, which is likely to be based on arguments that it violated a four-month statutory limit for interim officeholders. Mr Siebert had been interim US attorney for four months when the US District Court judges unanimously extended his tenure in May. He then resigned under pressure from Mr Trump. Some legal experts have questioned whether the statute permits more than one interim appointment.

Mr Fitzgerald is a former US attorney in Chicago who prosecuted Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D) on corruption charges and former vice president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, on charges including perjury and obstruction of justice. He is joined on the defence team by Jessica Carmichael, a lawyer in Northern Virginia who has represented high-profile clients accused of terrorism offenses.

On the prosecution side, two assistant US attorneys based in North Carolina, Gabriel J. Diaz and Nathaniel Lemons, filed court papers Tuesday saying they would join Ms Halligan’s team, court records show. Career prosecutors in the Virginia office had declined to do so, according to the people familiar with the matter.

FBI Director Kash Patel placed an agent on administrative leave for not wanting to take part in a public arrest and “perp walk” of Comey, according to two people with knowledge of the suspension who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. It’s unclear when those discussions happened. Halligan requested a court summons, not an arrest warrant, when the indictment was returned last month. Internal Justice Department rules prohibit “perp walks.”

Lemons said Wednesday that prosecutors were not seeking pretrial detention for the former FBI director.

“We’re just getting our hands around the discovery as well,” Lemons told the judge. The case against Comey, he said, involves a “significant amount of classified information,” but the government has an “eye toward declassifying” materials that could be used at trial.

To convict Mr Comey on the false-statements charge, a jury would have to find that he knowingly and wilfully deceived the Judiciary Committee about an issue that was material to what the senators were examining. The 2020 hearing focused on the FBI’s missteps in the Trump-Russia investigation, the same subject that has long animated Mr Trump’s criticisms of Mr Comey. However, the false-statement charge against Mr Comey involves a different FBI investigation - into Hillary Clinton’s foundation in 2016.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked Mr Comey whether he had ever authorized “someone else at the FBI” to be an anonymous source to the news media regarding the Trump-Russia investigation or the investigation into Ms Clinton. Mr Comey said that he stood by previous congressional testimony in which he said that he had not authorized a leak.

The indictment alleges that testimony was false and that Mr Comey had authorized another person “to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation” into Ms Clinton.

Court documents do not identify the person prosecutors allege Mr Comey authorized to leak information or the news articles at issue. In a 2018 report, however, the Justice Department inspector general found that the FBI’s then-deputy director, Andrew McCabe, had authorized the disclosure of the Clinton probe to a Wall Street Journal reporter and then “lacked candour” when Mr Comey and other officials asked him about the source of the leak.

Mr McCabe, in a CNN interview last month, said it was “unbelievable” that federal law enforcement officials had not reached out to him to inquire about Mr Comey’s testimony.

“All I can say is what my own experience revealed, and that is, I didn’t ever see Jim Comey authorizing other people to leak information,” Mr McCabe said.

At an earlier congressional hearing in 2017, Mr Comey acknowledged he had asked a friend at Columbia Law School to share information with a reporter from the New York Times about conversations he had with Mr Trump during the early days of his first term. A professor at the school, former prosecutor Daniel Richman, later said he was that friend but maintained that any information he shared at Mr Comey’s behest was not classified.

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