WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is attempting to prosecute James Comey for what it calls a decade-old leak of classified information, an effort the former FBI director's lawyers immediately dismissed as invalid and outside the legal time limit for when the Justice Department can file a criminal indictment.
The allegations from the Justice Department were revealed Monday in newly unsealed court documents that shed light on a closed-door fight that represents an unmistakable escalation in the administration's targeting of Comey, a longtime critic and foe of President Donald Trump who has faced two other criminal cases since the Republican returned to the White House last year. The effort to prosecute Comey is also part of a series of politically charged investigative actions the department has undertaken in the run-up to next week's midterm elections.
“Well, they’re back — again,” Comey said in a video statement Monday. “It would almost be funny if it weren't such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice – one that we cannot become numb to. Nothing’s changed with me; I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid of these people — and I still believe in an independent federal judiciary.”
The Justice Department said it had filed what's known as a “criminal information” to extend the statute of limitations for when they can permissibly bring an indictment.
"Filing a criminal information to toll the statute of limitations is a widely recognized practice in federal court and has been approved by multiple Circuit Courts of Appeals. This is an ongoing criminal investigation, and we will not comment further,” a department spokesperson said.
An information can be filed without the approval of a judge or a grand jury's finding of probable cause to a court. Comey’s lawyers made clear that they intend to fight the charges as invalid and barred by a 10-year statute of limitations.
“For the third time in little more than one year, the Department of Justice has attempted to charge Mr. Comey with a federal crime. Mr. Comey steadfastly maintains his innocence,” his attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, said in a statement.
The latest allegation concerns an October 2016 New York Times story related to a secret court order that required Yahoo to scan emails for messages potentially linked to a foreign terrorist organization. The story cited two government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the order from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Yahoo was barred from publicly disclosing.
Federal authorities, including prosecutor John Durham, began investigating the disclosure in early 2017. Durham, who later investigated the FBI's conduct as it scrutinized potential ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, wrote a classified memo in December 2018 recommending no criminal charges against anyone in connection with the disclosure, Comey’s attorneys said in a recent court filing.
In January 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia opened a second investigation of the same matter under the code name “Tropical Vortex.” But that investigation was closed without any charges filed in February 2020.
“Both times the Government determined that no charges should be brought against anyone. Now, ten years after the article was published, the Government filed an “Information” against Mr. Comey that was not approved by a judge nor issued by a grand jury. It purports to charge Mr. Comey with crimes that he did not commit,” Fitzgerald said.
Prosecutors in a newly unsealed filing said investigators found evidence that Comey “sought to correct misinformation which had appeared in the press by way of Reuters the day before” that New York Times story was published, directed his staff to speak to a journalist at the newspaper related to accuracy concerns “and thereby illegally transferred classified information.”
The criminal information was filed under seal on Oct. 6, 2016, 10 years after the story was published. “But,” Comey's lawyers said, “the applicable statute of limitations explicitly demands an indictment within 10 years of the offense; an information does not suffice.”
They have asked a judge to dismiss the information, a request that is still pending.
The first criminal case against Comey, filed in federal court in Virginia, accused him of having lied to Congress in 2020 but was dismissed by a judge who concluded that the prosecutor who brought the charges was illegally appointed. A separate pending indictment charges the former FBI director with threatening Trump through an Instagram photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47,” a case he has sought to dismiss and some legal experts have greeted with skepticism.
The cases are part of a Trump retribution campaign that has even extended to Comey's daughter, Maurene, who was fired from her job as a Justice Department prosecutor in New York last year in a termination that a federal judge on Monday ruled was illegal.
Comey was the FBI director when Trump took office in 2017, having been appointed by then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and serving before that as a senior Justice Department official in President George W. Bush’s Republican administration.
But the relationship was strained from the start, including after Comey resisted a request by Trump at a private dinner to pledge his personal loyalty to the president -- an overture that so unnerved the FBI director that he documented it in a contemporaneous memorandum.
Trump fired Comey in May 2017 amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign. That inquiry, later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, found that while Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the Trump team welcomed the help, there was insufficient evidence to prove a criminal collaboration.
The two men have been bitterly at odds ever since Comey's firing. Comey in 2018 published a memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” that painted Trump in deeply unflattering ways, likening him to a mafia don and characterizing him “untethered to truth.” Trump, for his part, has repeatedly claimed that Comey should face charges for “treason” — an accusation Comey dismissed as “dumb lies” — and called him an “untruthful slime ball.”
FILE - Former FBI Director James Comey speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Thursday, June 8, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
FILE - The U.S. Department of Justice logo is seen on a podium before a press conference, May 6, 2025, at the Justice Department in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
CORINTH, Miss. (AP) — President Donald Trump campaigned Monday in Mississippi, as he continues a closing midterm rally blitz that highlights Republicans' challenges ahead of an election that could drastically shift power in Washington and statehouses across the country.
“I'm here because Cindy’s doing great, but I just got to make sure. I can’t take a chance,” Trump told the crowd, his voice audibly hoarse, as he worked to boost Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is facing a surprisingly stiff challenge from Democrat Scott Colom.
Colom was spotted at the rally site, too, creating the rare spectacle of Trump's staunchest supporters interacting directly with a figure the president would soon go on to denigrate as a “Marxist radical” and “fake" and “shameless phony who pretends to be a moderate” from the stage.
Mississippi, among the nation’s most reliably Republican states, is not where the GOP envisioned needing a late-October stop from the president. But Colom is one of many Democratic underdogs who have managed to expand the House and Senate battleground maps because of widespread voter discontent over inflation, the Iran war and other aspects of Trump’s second presidency.
He said he had planned to go to the rally site to listen to what was on Trump supporters' minds.
"They actually deserve a senator that will listen to them, that actually cares about what they think, actually cares about what they’re going through,” Colom said ahead of the president's arrival for the evening event.
Colom's spokesperson later posted a photo on X, saying he had “chatted with folks in line for the Trump rally because Scott is running to represent ALL Mississippians.”
Trump's event kicks off a week of aggressive campaigning that will include more stops in states he won comfortably in 2024, including Texas, South Carolina and Iowa.
Top Democratic candidates and their surrogates were also greeting voters — more than 30 million of whom have already cast ballots — as they try to end Republicans' threadbare majority in the House, take over a Senate majority that was once thought secure for Republicans and end the GOP’s national advantage in state capitals.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats' 2024 presidential candidate, was campaigning in Wisconsin with Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who faces Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Trump ally, for governor. Crowley would be the state’s first Black governor if elected to lead the battleground state.
“This is a tight race because the stakes are so high,” Harris said at the event billed as a “Women for Crowley” rally.
Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms were getting an assist from Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and a likely 2028 presidential candidate, two days after Trump made his second October visit to the state.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed distanced himself from an ad created by a political action committee called Rebellion PAC that blames high grocery prices on U.S. support for Israel.
“This ad is not affiliated in any way with the Abdul for Senate campaign,” a spokesperson for El-Sayed, Roxie Richner, said in a statement about the spot, which features a couple discussing U.S. support for Israel as they shop for groceries.
“Apparently it’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza,” the woman says.
The ad had been condemned by U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost to El-Sayed in the Democratic primary.
The way to win Michigan “is not by blaming the high costs of our goods on the only Jewish homeland in the world,” Stevens wrote on X.
El-Sayed, who would be the country’s first Muslim senator, has denounced antisemitism while fiercely criticizing Israel for its military operations in Gaza — a position that has been a frequent point of attack for both Republicans and supporters of Israel in his party.
Vice President JD Vance traveled to Kansas on behalf of Sen. Roger Marshall, who finds himself in a tight contest with Democratic nominee and pastor Adam Hamilton. Hundreds of people were gathered inside the warehouse of a steel-fabricating company in north Topeka in a state where Democrats haven’t won a Senate race since 1932.
Marshall told the crowd that Trump is on the ballot, even if his name doesn’t appear, because of how Democrats will thwart his agenda if they win control of Congress.
“Democrats are coming out like it’s a presidential year,” he said, calling for GOP enthusiasm to match Democrats’ energy.
Jace Sullivan, a 50-year-old electrician from Topeka who describes himself as “85% Republican,” said Trump supporters need to “circle the wagons” and get out to vote.
Wearing a red “JD Vance for President 2028" shirt, he said he thinks Trump is rightly working to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
“Gas prices are high and it does suck, but it’s a means to an end,” Sullivan said.
Earlier, Vance was in Belgrade, Montana, to campaign with Republican Aaron Flint, who is facing Democrat Sam Forstag in the race for the state’s 1st Congressional District, and Republican Senate candidate Kurt Alme.
But it's Trump's visit to Mississippi that perhaps brings the midterm landscape into the sharpest relief with just a week of campaigning left.
To be sure, Hyde-Smith, who is vying for her second full term, remains the favorite in a state Trump won three times by an average of nearly 20 percentage points.
But Colom, a local prosecutor who would make history as Mississippi's first Black senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction, is looking to parlay inflation, Trump's lagging popularity and Hyde-Smith's mistakes into an upset.
Colom has outpaced Hyde-Smith in fundraising since he launched his campaign last year, and he caught national attention this month with an ad that played off Hyde-Smith dismissing beef prices — driven higher by Trump's tariffs and fuel spikes resulting from the Iran conflict. The ad features Hyde-Smith, a former state agriculture commissioner, saying that consumers “have so many other proteins to choose from,” followed by several characters, and then Colom, saying Mississippi should “ pick another senator instead. ”
Senate Democrats’ super PAC has been a late entry in the contest, with a $1.2 million investment. Mississippians have not chosen a new Democratic senator since 1947, and Democrats last won a Senate race there when that senator, the onetime segregationist John Stennis, won his last reelection in 1982.
In New York, meanwhile, one of the party’s most vulnerable House members pulled from Trump’s campaign playbook. Rep. Mike Lawler, who is in a tight race with Democrat Cait Conley in New York City’s northern suburbs, manned a McDonald’s drive-thru — mimicking something Trump did two years ago, even as Lawler has tried to emphasize his independence from the president.
Barrow reported from Atlanta and Colvin from New York. Associated Press reporters John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas; Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; Laura Turbay in St. Paul, Minnesota; Seung Min Kim in Belgrade, Montana; and Anthony Izaguirre in New York contributed.
President Donald Trump yells as he arrives on Air Force One at Frederick W. Smith Airport, in Memphis, Tenn., Monday, Oct. 26, 2026, en route to a campaign rally in Mississippi. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Vice President JD Vance reacts after speaking at a campaign rally at Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport, Monday, Oct. 26, 2026, in Belgrade, Mont. (Finn Gomez/Pool Photo via AP)
Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, left, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, receives an embrace from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., at a campaign rally Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at Lincoln Park Middle School in Duluth, Minn. (AP Photo/Erica Dischino)
President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a campaign rally at McMorran Place Sports and Entertainment Center, Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026, in Port Huron, Mich. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
