James Comey is back in a federal courtroom, and his fans already know exactly who to blame.
His lawyers say two teams of prosecutors already looked at this story and walked away.
And Comey’s alleged leak traces back to one government secret Americans were never supposed to learn about.
Prosecutors Beat the Clock by Zero Days
Federal prosecutors have charged the former FBI Director with two counts under the Espionage Act. That makes three criminal cases the Justice Department has brought against him since 2025.
Prosecutors filed the paperwork under seal in federal court in Washington, DC on October 5, 2026. Judge Trevor McFadden unsealed it after Comey asked to make it public, and the government didn’t object.
Count one accuses Comey of passing information relating to the national defense to someone with no right to receive it. Count two charges him with conspiring to do it.
The charging document runs all of three pages. It never names the reporter, the newspaper, the secret, or the person prosecutors call “Individual #1.”
But the government’s later court filings fill in most of the blanks. Prosecutors point to a New York Times story by reporter Charlie Savage that the paper ran on October 5, 2016, while Comey still ran the FBI. The headline read “Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter.”
And the story behind that headline is where this case gets a whole lot more interesting than the cable panels let on.
The Program That Searched Everybody’s Inbox
One day before the Times piece, Reuters reporter Joseph Menn published a story that sent privacy advocates through the roof. According to people familiar with the matter, Yahoo had secretly built custom software in 2015 to search every incoming email its customers received for specific information US intelligence officials supplied.
Reuters reported the company acted at the behest of the National Security Agency or the FBI. The program touched hundreds of millions of accounts.
Picture a retired machinist in Knoxville opening his Yahoo inbox to find his granddaughter’s softball pictures. If Reuters had it right, a government-ordered program got to his mail before he did.
According to prosecutors, Comey didn’t care for how Reuters told that story.
The government says Comey “sought to correct misinformation which had appeared in the press by way of Reuters the day before.” Prosecutors wrote that he “directed staff to speak to [the New York Times reporter] about specific accuracy concerns related to the Reuters article, and thereby illegally transferred classified information.”
So follow the logic of the charge. If the allegations hold up, the head of the FBI reached for classified material to polish the image of a program that combed through Americans’ email, and he routed it through a friendly newspaper to do it.
Comey denies every bit of it. In a video response, he said “they’re back again” and called the case an “appalling abuse of the Department of Justice.” His attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, said two separate teams of prosecutors in Trump’s first term examined the same article. “Both times the Government determined that no charges should be brought against anyone,” Fitzgerald said.
Comey’s legal team also wants the case tossed on timing. Federal law gives prosecutors ten years for certain espionage offenses, and the government filed on the final day. His lawyers argue that ten-year window only applies when a grand jury returns an indictment, and prosecutors used a criminal information instead. The Justice Department counters that filing in time preserved the case. Prosecutors also agreed to wait 30 days before seeking an indictment.
Judge McFadden hasn’t ruled yet.
Comey Wrote the Rulebook He Now Hates
The Democrats and their media allies will call this a vendetta. They said the same thing about the first case.
That one, filed in September 2025, accused Comey of lying to Congress about whether he authorized leaks to reporters back in 2016. A judge threw it out in November 2025 after ruling that the prosecutor who brought it held her job improperly. The ruling turned on the appointment.
The second case sits in North Carolina. It centers on a photo Comey posted to Instagram of seashells spelling out “86 47,” which the Justice Department says amounted to a threat against President Trump. Comey deleted the post and insisted he opposes violence.
Attorney General Todd Blanche told Kristen Welker of Meet the Press that investigators looked well past the photo. “But rest assured that it’s not just the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted,” Blanche said.
But leaks follow Comey around like a stray dog that knows where the food is. In June 2017, he told the Senate Intelligence Committee he had asked a friend to share the contents of a memo about his private conversations with President Trump with a reporter. The Justice Department’s inspector general later found his handling of those memos broke FBI policy. Prosecutors declined to charge him.
And then there’s July 2016, three months before the Yahoo story. Comey stood at a podium and told the country Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” with highly classified information. Then he announced that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Comey got to draw that line for somebody else. Now a federal judge gets to decide where it sits for him.
Washington Has Seen This Movie Before
Nobody should get too far ahead of the evidence here. The charging papers don’t say what secret moved, two earlier teams passed on the case, and Comey could walk on the statute-of-limitations question without a jury ever hearing a word.
But the pattern looks awfully familiar.
In the 1970s, FBI Associate Director Mark Felt fed the Washington Post the material that helped bring down Richard Nixon. The press turned “Deep Throat” into a folk hero. The coverage rarely dwelled on the fact that Felt had just lost out on the top job at the bureau and had a score to settle. Nixon’s cover-up was real. So was the lesson Washington’s permanent class took from it: a senior FBI man can use the newspapers as a weapon, and the newspapers will call it courage.
That same class spent years treating Donald Trump’s complaints about the bureau as paranoia.
The bigger scandal may sit in the subject matter itself. Reuters noted at the time that the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act let intelligence agencies ask phone and internet companies for customer data. Congress has renewed those powers again and again since then, always with fresh promises about guardrails.
Ordinary Yahoo users had no say in any of it. They didn’t get a hearing or a warrant with their name on it. Their only window into the program came from anonymous sources.
And according to prosecutors, the man running the FBI decided which version of that story the public got to read.
On October 4, 2016, Reuters told Yahoo customers the government might be searching their incoming mail. On October 5, according to prosecutors, the director of the FBI had his staff talking to the New York Times.
Sources: Breitbart News; Reuters; NBC News; CBS News; Axios; Fox News; Newsmax; The Daily Wire; UPI; MS NOW; BNO News; Mediaite; NBC’s Meet the Press; Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, June 2017; FBI statement on the Clinton email investigation, July 2016