Federal prosecutors signaled Sunday that they might search as well Patrick Fitzgerald, James Comey’s lead protection lawyer, due to Fitzgerald’s alleged involvement in disclosures to the media shortly after President Donald Trump fired Comey as FBI director in 2017.
In a submission Sunday night, prosecutors prompt to U.S. District Decide Michael Nachmanoff that Fitzgerald, Comey’s lawyer and shut good friend, might have an insurmountable battle of curiosity because of the disclosures.
Fitzgerald is representing Comey in a legal case ordered up by Trump and introduced final month in Virginia, the place Comey faces two felony costs for making a false assertion and obstructing a federal continuing.
The prosecutors requested the choose to rapidly approve a proposal for a “filter staff” of attorneys to sift by means of proof in Comey’s legal case that might make clear Fitzgerald’s position within the eight-year-old disclosures — with out breaching Comey’s attorney-client privilege.
Prosecutors proposed the “filter staff” to the court docket final week, however within the new submitting they stated the request has specific urgency as a result of Fitzgerald performed a task in Comey’s launch of knowledge that officers later deemed labeled.
“Based mostly on publicly disclosed data, the defendant used present lead protection counsel to improperly disclose labeled data,” prosecutors Tyler Lemons and Gabriel Diaz wrote. “This truth raises a query of battle and disqualification for present lead protection counsel.”
The brand new submitting is brief on particulars, however references a Justice Division Workplace of Inspector Normal report from 2019 that discovered Fitzgerald acted as a intermediary when Comey sought to get data to the media about what he seen as improper efforts by Trump to get him to pledge loyalty within the days earlier than his firing.
A few month after Comey was fired, he acknowledged throughout Senate testimony that he requested one other lawyer and good friend, Columbia legislation professor Daniel Richman, to provide variations of his memos to The New York Occasions in a bid to ensure a particular counsel was named to research Trump’s conduct.
The inspector normal report discovered that a number of the data Comey shared along with his attorneys was labeled and faulted him for sharing delicate investigative data with outsiders and the media, but additionally discovered no proof “that Comey or his attorneys launched any of the labeled data contained in any of the memos to members of the media.”
The report additionally famous that the FBI moved to delete the supplies Fitzgerald obtained from his electronic mail accounts — and that Fitzgerald, a former U.S. Legal professional in Chicago, “voluntarily and promptly” cooperated.
The Justice Division, through the first Trump administration, declined to prosecute Comey or anybody else over the dealing with or disclosure of Comey’s memos about his conversations with Trump.
Nonetheless, final month, Comey was charged with making false statements and obstruction of Congress. The fees seem to narrate to Comey’s alleged denial of involvement in different leaks throughout testimony to a Senate committee in 2020.
Fitzgerald declined to remark Sunday on the prosecution’s submitting, which got here at some point earlier than Comey’s attorneys are scheduled to file their first substantive motions within the case. Comey’s attorneys are set to hunt to dismiss the case on grounds of selective and vindictive prosecution in addition to on the grounds that the Trump-appointed prosecutor who introduced the case, Lindsey Halligan, was not lawfully put in because the interim U.S. Legal professional for the Jap District of Virginia.
Filter groups are a comparatively routine however controversial facet of many high-profile legal instances involving authorities officers and different defendants who’re attorneys or whose attorneys additionally wind up below investigators’ scrutiny. The staff’s job is to overview the content material of telephones or computer systems seized throughout a legal probe and display screen out any supplies that might be topic to attorney-client privilege, government privilege or different limits on prosecutors’ capacity to entry them.
Prosecutors didn’t present the choose with a duplicate of the Inspector Normal report, however supplied a hyperlink to a model of it offered on the non-profit Web Archive’s Wayback Machine. The DOJ Inspector Normal’s workplace reported earlier this month that its web site was frozen after which taken offline as a result of Trump administration’s effort to shutter an umbrella group, the Council of the Inspectors Normal on Integrity and Effectivity.
