Prosecutors might transfer to oust James Comey’s protection lawyer

Federal prosecutors signaled Sunday that they could search in addition Patrick Fitzgerald, James Comey’s lead protection legal professional, 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 steered to U.S. District Choose Michael Nachmanoff that Fitzgerald, Comey’s lawyer and shut pal, might have an insurmountable battle of curiosity because of the disclosures.

Fitzgerald is representing Comey in a felony case ordered up by Trump and introduced final month in Virginia, the place Comey faces two felony prices for making a false assertion and obstructing a federal continuing.

The prosecutors requested the choose to shortly approve a proposal for a “filter group” of legal professionals to sift via proof in Comey’s felony case that would make clear Fitzgerald’s function within the eight-year-old disclosures — with out breaching Comey’s attorney-client privilege.

Prosecutors proposed the “filter group” to the court docket final week, however within the new submitting they stated the request has explicit urgency as a result of Fitzgerald performed a task in Comey’s launch of knowledge that officers later deemed categorized.

“Primarily based on publicly disclosed info, the defendant used present lead protection counsel to improperly disclose categorized info,” 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 Basic report from 2019 that discovered Fitzgerald acted as a intermediary when Comey sought to get info to the media about what he considered as improper efforts by Trump to get him to pledge loyalty within the days earlier than his firing.

A couple of month after Comey was fired, he acknowledged throughout Senate testimony that he requested one other lawyer and pal, Columbia regulation professor Daniel Richman, to provide variations of his memos to The New York Instances in a bid to ensure a particular counsel was named to analyze Trump’s conduct.

The inspector basic report discovered that a number of the info Comey shared together with his attorneys was categorized and faulted him for sharing delicate investigative info with outsiders and the media, but in addition discovered no proof “that Comey or his attorneys launched any of the categorized info contained in any of the memos to members of the media.”

The report additionally famous that the FBI moved to delete the supplies Fitzgerald acquired from his electronic mail accounts — and that Fitzgerald, a former U.S. Lawyer in Chicago, “voluntarily and promptly” cooperated.

The Justice Division, in the course of 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 legal professionals are scheduled to file their first substantive motions within the case. Comey’s legal professionals 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. Lawyer for the Japanese District of Virginia.

Filter groups are a comparatively routine however controversial side of many high-profile felony circumstances involving authorities officers and different defendants who’re legal professionals or whose legal professionals additionally wind up underneath investigators’ scrutiny. The group’s job is to assessment the content material of telephones or computer systems seized throughout a felony probe and display screen out any supplies that may very well 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 Basic report, however provided a hyperlink to a model of it offered on the non-profit Web Archive’s Wayback Machine. The DOJ Inspector Basic’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 Basic on Integrity and Effectivity.