'Callous disregard': James Comey's pal pleads with judge to stop Trump DOJ's 'endless' searches of seized files that sparked magistrate's ire

James Comey's friend and former personal attorney Daniel Richman has sued the Trump administration's DOJ to block the government from indefinitely searching his files, which were seized five to six years ago as part of a leak probe that led to no charges against him.

The existence of the Richman action was first reported by Lawfare's Anna Bower on her Substack.

The docket reviewed by Law&Crime shows that Richman filed the case on the eve of Thanksgiving, asking Senior U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — appointed to judgeships by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and once appointed the presiding judge of the FISA court by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist — to find that the Trump administration trampled on his Fourth Amendment rights while attempting to prosecute his friend and former client James Comey.

Richman's motion, seeking "redress for the government's violations" through the return of his property and an injunction barring the DOJ from "any further use of the improperly seized or retained materials," claimed that the feds violated attorney-client privilege to aid its since-dismissed prosecution of the former FBI director — as reports swirl about a potential DOJ attempt to secure a new indictment against Comey.

"Between 2017 and 2020, Professor Richman, an attorney and law professor with a distinguished record of government service, had various interactions with the government relating to his legal representation of former FBI Director James B. Comey, Mr. Comey's handling of potentially classified information, and related communications with the media," the motion explained, apparently referring to then-active "Arctic Haze" probe of alleged FBI leaks to the media about the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. "Professor Richman agreed to allow the government to image his personal computer for the purpose of identifying and deleting certain sensitive documents and subsequently agreed to a limited search of the image. The government later obtained four warrants that authorized additional searches of the image and of Professor Richman's email and iCloud accounts."

Although Richman was never charged and claims to have heard nothing from the government for four years, "between 2021 and 2025," Comey's late September false statement and obstruction indictment "brought to light troubling facts concerning the government's handling of the materials it obtained from" him, the filing said.

Here, Richman alluded to Comey's claims that an FBI agent who testified before the Comey grand jury "may have been exposed to Mr. Comey's privileged communications with his attorneys and thus may have conveyed that information to the grand jury."

As Law&Crime reported at the time, the exact details of the communications were redacted, but the information "apparently related to certain attorneys" for Comey, including Richman, and that the potentially "tainted case agent" testified the same day that the agent was "informed" of "privileged material."

The prosecution led by Lindsey Halligan had alleged that Comey, under questioning conducted by Sen. Ted Cruz on Sept. 30, 2020, lied when he denied that he had "'authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports' regarding an FBI investigation concerning Person 1," namely Hillary Clinton, because he "knew, he in fact had authorized PERSON 3," Richman, "to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1."

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Comey maintained that Cruz's "imprecise compound questions" made it seem to the "reasonable person" that the senator was asking whether the ex-FBI director "specifically authorized" former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to "be an anonymous source in news reports," not Richman.

Regardless, the case was dismissed last week on the grounds that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi "unlawfully appointed" Halligan as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. But questions have been raised about whether Richman's motion will complicate the DOJ's potentially renewed effort to indict Comey.

Richman's motion to recover his property was filed two days after the dismissal, court documents indicate.

In it, he claimed the government "retained the materials that it collected from Professor Richman's personal computer, email, and iCloud account" and "perhaps most egregiously, in a last-ditch effort to support its prosecution of Mr. Comey, the government conducted a new warrantless search of Professor Richman's files in September 2025 in contravention of clear constitutional rules and the attorney-client privilege."

That "deprived" him of "his constitutional rights" and paved the way for him to demand the "return of the files at issue, as well as any copies thereof," the motion said.

Those files not only include "a significant quantum of privileged information involving multiple clients," but also "communication with federal judges, including in connection with student applications for law clerk positions," family medical records, and "comprehensive financial records," the filing continued, citing U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick's takedown of the government's handling of the Comey case.

Fitzpatrick, taking the rare step of ordering the federal prosecution to hand over all grand jury materials to Comey's defense, addressed the Richman files and the government's "cavalier attitude towards a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment[.]"

"The Arctic Haze investigation was closed in September 2021, with no charges filed. The Richman materials sat dormant with the FBI until the summer of 2025, when the Bureau chose to rummage through them again," Fitzpatrick wrote, noting that the government "[i]nexplicably […] elected not to seek a new warrant for the 2025 search, even though the 2025 investigation was focused on a different person," Comey.

"The Court recognizes that a failure to seek a new warrant under these circumstances is highly unusual," the magistrate continued, writing that Comey had "raise[d] genuine issues of misconduct" traceable to the government's "purposeful, reckless, or negligent" actions.

Unsurprisingly, Richman agrees.

"The callous disregard that the government has displayed towards Professor Richman's rights creates a significant risk that the government will cause irreparable harm to Professor Richman in other ways if it is permitted to retain his personal Files—for example by conducting additional warrantless searches or violating the terms of any future warrants that might issue," the plaintiff argued, asking Kollar-Kotelly to put a stop to the DOJ's ability to "conduct endless general searches over the Files[.]"