Daniel Richman, who previously served as James Comey’s personal attorney, has initiated legal action against the Trump-era Department of Justice. Richman aims to prevent the government from indefinitely examining his files, which were confiscated around five to six years ago during a leak investigation that ultimately did not result in any charges against him.

Anna Bower of Lawfare was the first to reveal Richman’s lawsuit, sharing details in a Substack post.

Documents reviewed by Law&Crime indicate that Richman submitted his lawsuit just before Thanksgiving. He is appealing to Senior U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a judge with appointments made by Presidents Reagan and Clinton, and former presiding judge of the FISA court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Richman argues that the Trump administration violated his Fourth Amendment rights in its pursuit of prosecuting his associate and former client, James Comey.

In his legal filing, Richman seeks “redress for the government’s violations,” demanding the return of his property and an injunction to stop the DOJ from using the seized materials. He alleges that the federal authorities breached attorney-client privilege while attempting to prosecute Comey, as rumors circulate regarding a new DOJ indictment against Comey.

The motion outlines that between 2017 and 2020, Richman, who is a seasoned attorney and law professor with notable public service experience, engaged with the government concerning his legal work for former FBI Director James B. Comey. This involvement centered around Comey’s management of potentially sensitive information and his interactions with the media. The filing appears to reference the “Arctic Haze” investigation into alleged FBI leaks about the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email use during her tenure as Secretary of State. Richman had permitted the government to copy his personal computer to identify and delete specific sensitive documents, agreeing to a restricted search of the data. Subsequently, the government acquired four warrants allowing further exploration of his computer, email, and iCloud accounts.

Despite never facing charges and having no communication from the government for four years, Richman noted that Comey’s recent indictment for false statements and obstruction in late September unveiled concerning aspects regarding the government’s treatment of the materials obtained from him.

Here, Richman alluded to Comey’s claims that an FBI agent who testified before the Comey grand jury “may have been exposed to Mr. Comey’s privileged communications with his attorneys and thus may have conveyed that information to the grand jury.”

As Law&Crime reported at the time, the exact details of the communications were redacted, but the information “apparently related to certain attorneys” for Comey, including Richman, and that the potentially “tainted case agent” testified the same day that the agent was “informed” of “privileged material.”

The prosecution led by Lindsey Halligan had alleged that Comey, under questioning conducted by Sen. Ted Cruz on Sept. 30, 2020, lied when he denied that he had “‘authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports’ regarding an FBI investigation concerning Person 1,” namely Hillary Clinton, because he “knew, he in fact had authorized PERSON 3,” Richman, “to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1.”

Comey maintained that Cruz’s “imprecise compound questions” made it seem to the “reasonable person” that the senator was asking whether the ex-FBI director “specifically authorized” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to “be an anonymous source in news reports,” not Richman.

Regardless, the case was dismissed last week on the grounds that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi “unlawfully appointed” Halligan as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. But questions have been raised about whether Richman’s motion will complicate the DOJ’s potentially renewed effort to indict Comey.

Richman’s motion to recover his property was filed two days after the dismissal, court documents indicate.

In it, he claimed the government “retained the materials that it collected from Professor Richman’s personal computer, email, and iCloud account” and “perhaps most egregiously, in a last-ditch effort to support its prosecution of Mr. Comey, the government conducted a new warrantless search of Professor Richman’s files in September 2025 in contravention of clear constitutional rules and the attorney-client privilege.”

That “deprived” him of “his constitutional rights” and paved the way for him to demand the “return of the files at issue, as well as any copies thereof,” the motion said.

Those files not only include “a significant quantum of privileged information involving multiple clients,” but also “communication with federal judges, including in connection with student applications for law clerk positions,” family medical records, and “comprehensive financial records,” the filing continued, citing U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick’s takedown of the government’s handling of the Comey case.

Fitzpatrick, taking the rare step of ordering the federal prosecution to hand over all grand jury materials to Comey’s defense, addressed the Richman files and the government’s “cavalier attitude towards a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment[.]”

“The Arctic Haze investigation was closed in September 2021, with no charges filed. The Richman materials sat dormant with the FBI until the summer of 2025, when the Bureau chose to rummage through them again,” Fitzpatrick wrote, noting that the government “[i]nexplicably […] elected not to seek a new warrant for the 2025 search, even though the 2025 investigation was focused on a different person,” Comey.

“The Court recognizes that a failure to seek a new warrant under these circumstances is highly unusual,” the magistrate continued, writing that Comey had “raise[d] genuine issues of misconduct” traceable to the government’s “purposeful, reckless, or negligent” actions.

Unsurprisingly, Richman agrees.

“The callous disregard that the government has displayed towards Professor Richman’s rights creates a significant risk that the government will cause irreparable harm to Professor Richman in other ways if it is permitted to retain his personal Files—for example by conducting additional warrantless searches or violating the terms of any future warrants that might issue,” the plaintiff argued, asking Kollar-Kotelly to put a stop to the DOJ’s ability to “conduct endless general searches over the Files[.]”