James Comeys defense attorney may have a conflict of interest, feds claim, signaling they may seek to boot him
The lawyer defending James Comey against charges he lied to Congress might need to be kicked off the case over his alleged involvement in the same media leaks during the first Trump administration that got the former FBI director in trouble in the first place, federal prosecutors said Sunday.Comey, 64, hired former Chicago US Attorney and pal Patrick Fitzgerald in the criminal case mounted against him in the Eastern District of Virginia last month following calls from President Trump for his prosecution.The feds are now claiming that since the former FBI boss allegedly used Fitzgerald as a go-between with the press to leak information that was later determined to be classified — it “raises a question of conflict and disqualification” for the veteran lawyer, their Oct.19 filing alleged.“Based on publicly disclosed information, the defendant used current lead defense counsel to improperly disclose classified information,” prosecutors claimed.The Department of Justice Office of Inspector General in an August 2019 report on Comey’s disclosure of sensitive investigative information found that he had sent four memos to Fitzgerald a week after his ouster from the bureau.The memos were sent from a personal email account detailing private conversations he had with Trump between January and May 2017, which included claims that the 45th president asked for an investigation into Michael Flynn to be dropped.Fitzgerald forwarded the memos to David Kelley and Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman, the FBI director’s “good friend” whom he later acknowledged to the Senate Intelligence Committee had been authorized to serve as an anonymous source to the press.Comey told the DOJ inspector general that he retained all three as his personal lawyers “very shortly” after Trump fired the FBI director on May 9, 2017.He also claimed to the federal watchdog that he believed there was “nothing classified” in the memos — though the FBI took steps to delet...