Is There Anyone On Comey’s Legal Team Who Wasn’t Getting Leaks From The FBI?
Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey filed a motion on Monday to dismiss the charges of lying to Congress brought by District Attorney Lindsey Halligan in the Eastern District of Virginia. Comey, however, has retained yet another one of his former leak recipients as a defense attorney, raising the question: Is there anyone on Comey’s defense team that he wasn’t leaking to?
According to a 2019 Office of Inspector General report, in May 2017, James Comey sent four confidential FBI memos to his personal lawyer Patrick Fitzgerald, along with instructions to share the documents with two other lawyers: Daniel Richman and David Kelley. Fitzgerald and Kelley are Comey’s defense lawyers in the case brought by Halligan.
As Federalist CEO Sean Davis pointed out in an X post, Comey hiring his leak recipients as his legal team not only prevents two direct witnesses of his allegedly illegal behavior from testifying against him, but also potentially places incriminating communication between the three men under the protection of attorney-client privilege.
Comey leaked memos to at least three attorneys: David Kelley, Patrick Fitzgerald, and Daniel Richman. Comey has claimed all three as his personal attorneys. Two of them—Kelley and Fitzgerald—are inappropriately representing Comey in his criminal case.
Why do I say… https://t.co/e1uQErU3Pu
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) October 20, 2025
Understandably, the prosecution asked Judge Michael Nachmanoff last weekend to approve a “filter team” to comb through the evidence in order to — as Politico’s reporting framed it — “clarify Fitzgerald’s role in the 8-year-old disclosures.”
Contrary to Politico’s spin, Fitzgerald’s role needs little additional “clarification.” The Office of the Inspector General report on the investigation into Comey’s leaks already clarified the situation — but perhaps not in the way Politico and Comey would have liked. As The Federalist’s Breccan Thies reported, “An August 2019 Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) report shows that Fitzgerald received detailed memos documenting Comey’s private meetings with President Donald Trump about the Russia collusion probe, with at least one containing classified information.” (Read more from “Is There Anyone On Comey’s Legal Team Who Wasn’t Getting Leaks From The FBI?” HERE)
