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.
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.”
Comey and Fitzgerald have shady dealings going back to at least the George W. Bush administration. In 2003, Comey — then a deputy attorney general — hired Fitzgerald as a special counsel to investigate the Plame affair, which was a 2003 CIA leak scandal surrounding the outing of undercover CIA officer Valarie Plame.
As special counsel, Fitzgerald reportedly encouraged a witness to give false testimony by not providing exonerating evidence, which led to the conviction of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. President Trump pardoned Libby in 2018.
As noted above, one of the individuals Fitzgerald distributed the leaked classified memos to in 2017 was Kelley, another member of Comey’s defense team.
Like Fitzgerald, Kelley also has a long history with James Comey. Kelley served as a deputy U.S. attorney from 2002 to 2003 under James Comey, who was then serving as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. When President George W. Bush tapped Comey for a deputy attorney general position in 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft promoted Kelley to take Comey’s vacant district attorney seat.
Fourteen years later, Comey leaked the FBI memos containing classified information to Kelley, who was his private attorney at the time, and certainly not a government official with authorization to receive the memos. Eight years after the leak, on Oct. 8, 2025, Kelley stood beside Comey in an Alexandria courtroom as he pleaded not guilty to charges of lying to Congress.
Comey’s trial is currently scheduled for Jan. 5, 2026, but already, the former FBI director’s choice of legal counsel appears to be another in a long line of Comey’s machinations.
Bradley Haley is a George Washington Fellow at Hillsdale College, and the Founder of New Guard Press.
