A new court filing by James Comey’s attorneys definitively answers a lingering question about the criminal charges against the former FBI director: Who is “Person 3”?
The Department of Justice last month charged Comey with lying during a 2020 Senate hearing. The two-page indictment accuses the former FBI director of falsely telling lawmakers that he never gave anybody at the FBI permission to serve as an anonymous source in news reports about the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton. But it doesn’t name the FBI staffer whom Comey allegedly authorized to leak, referring to them only as “Person 3.”
In a motion filed Monday to dismiss the charges, Comey’s lawyers wrote that last week, the government “confirmed to the defense that … Person 3 refers to Daniel Richman.”
Richman, a longtime friend of Comey, is a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor in New York. He served at one point as a “special government employee” at the FBI when Comey led the bureau.
It’s still unclear what information Richman is accused of leaking. The Justice Department has not charged Richman with a crime or accused him of any wrongdoing.
Monday’s filing — which argues Comey is the victim of a vindictive prosecution driven by President Trump’s “personal animus” toward him — marks the first time that court papers have named the person the Justice Department believes Comey authorized to leak. Several media outlets had previously reported that Richman was “Person 3.”
Richman’s name did not come up in the Senate testimony that led to Comey’s charges.
Instead, the indictment focuses on a testy back-and-forth in 2020, when Republican Sen. Ted Cruz grilled Comey about whether he let a different person — former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe — leak information about the Clinton probe to the Wall Street Journal. McCabe says he told Comey after the article came out that he authorized the leak, and Comey approved of it, but Comey has long insisted that no such conversation took place.
Comey had previously told Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in 2017 that he never authorized anyone to serve as an anonymous source in media coverage on the FBI’s investigations into Clinton or Mr. Trump. Three years later, Cruz argued McCabe’s statements about the Wall Street Journal leak contradicted that.
“Now, what Mr. McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. One or the other is false,” Cruz said to Comey in 2020. “Who’s telling the truth?”
“I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony,” replied Comey.
In Monday’s filing, Comey’s attorneys cast the fact that Cruz didn’t ask about Richman as a fatal flaw in the government’s case against the ex-FBI chief, who was charged with one count of making false statements to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional investigation.
The lawyers wrote: “the indictment omits Senator Cruz’s words that explicitly narrow the focus of his questions to Mr. McCabe and misleadingly implies that the questioning related to Mr. Richman.”
“In other words, the indictment presents an inaccurate description of the testimony at the heart of this case,” the court filing continued.
His attorneys also argue the Justice Department’s charges misquote Comey. The indictment says Comey falsely stated to the Senate that he hadn’t “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” — but that exact phrase was actually used by Cruz and Grassley, not Comey. And the filing notes that Cruz used the phrase “Clinton administration,” not “Clinton investigation.”
The filing says Comey is planning on asking for his false statement count to be dismissed “based on a defense of literal truth.” It referenced the Supreme Court case Bronston v. United States, which said people who make literally true statements under oath aren’t guilty of perjury.
CBS News has reached out to the Justice Department, Comey’s attorneys and Richman for comment.
What is Daniel Richman accused of doing?
The indictment doesn’t say what information the Justice Department believes Richman leaked to the media. It states only that Comey “authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1.”
Comey’s lawyers confirmed in Monday’s filing that “Person 1” referred to Clinton.
The filing points to one FBI leak investigation involving Comey and Richman called “Arctic Haze,” which was detailed in a memo declassified by the bureau earlier this year. Arctic Haze sought to figure out how classified details on the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server made their way into a 2017 New York Times article, which looked at Comey’s decision-making while leading the politically fraught probe.
Richman was interviewed as part of Arctic Haze, according to the heavily redacted memo, which was published by the conservative-leaning site Just The News. The memo says Richman told FBI agents he had spoken with one of the authors of the Times article, but he didn’t know how the reporter got a hold of the classified information, and Richman said he was “sure ‘with a discount'” that he didn’t tell the reporter himself.
The memo describes Richman as Comey’s “liaison to the media,” but also notes at one point: “Richman later told the interviewing agents Comey never asked him to talk to the media.”
The Arctic Haze investigation closed without any charges. The memo said the probe “has not yielded sufficient evidence to criminally charge any person, including Comey or Richman, with making false statements or with the substantive offenses under investigation.”
Separately, during the first Trump term, Comey was investigated by the Justice Department’s inspector general for giving memos about his conversations with Mr. Trump to Richman, who then provided their contents to a Times reporter. The internal watchdog found that Comey “violated applicable policies” but did not release any classified information.
Mr. Trump has accused Comey of leaks and other nefarious conduct for almost a decade, stretching back to when he fired Comey as FBI director in 2017. The president has long criticized how Comey handled the FBI’s probes into Clinton and the Trump campaign. Comey, for his part, has called Mr. Trump “morally unfit to be president.”
In Monday’s court papers, Comey’s lawyers asserted that Mr. Trump’s longstanding “personal spite” led to the charges against him, which were filed shortly before the statute of limitations expired.
“No reasonable prosecutor would have brought such a deficient case; the only explanation is that the President’s handpicked interim U.S. Attorney did so to carry out the President’s wishes,” they wrote in a 51-page filing, which also included a 60-page attachment listing all of the verbal barbs flung between Comey and Mr. Trump over the years.
