PinnedUpdated Oct. 8, 2025, 10:50 a.m. ETJames B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director reviled by President Trump and targeted as part of his retribution campaign, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Wednesday morning in federal court in Alexandria, Va.The judge overseeing the hearing set a trial date for Jan. 5. But Mr. Comey’s lead lawyer, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said he intended to file to motions to dismiss the case before then, including one accusing the government of malicious and selective prosecution based on Mr. Trump’s public demand that Comey be prosecuted.Mr. Fitzgerald, a former federal prosecutor, also said the Justice Department’s rush to charge Mr. Comey had left the defense unclear about the specifics of the counts against him. Mr. Comey was indicted last month in a two-page filing that did not detail the accusations against him.“We still have not been told who Person 3 and Person 1 are,” Mr. Fitzgerald said, referring to the indictment. He later added: “We still haven’t been told precisely what is in count 1 or count 2.”The case against Mr. Comey, who ordered the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, is the most significant legal action taken against those Mr. Trump has publicly targeted.Mr. Comey faces one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted, though many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove.Here’s what else to know:Routine proceeding: Mr. Comey’s plea and request for a jury trial were entered in a brief appearance before Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff. Judge Nachmanoff said he was “a little skeptical” about prosecutors’ insinuations that the case was complex enough to require extra time. “This does not appear to me to be an overly complicated case,” he said.Rocky path: The case proceeded over the opposition of prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. The prosecutor who ultimately handled it was Lindsey Halligan, a White House official hastily installed by Mr. Trump as U.S. attorney after her predecessor found insufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey.President’s impact: Vindictive prosecution motions are notoriously difficult to win, but Mr. Trump’s voluble vitriol and his repeated attacks on his former F.B.I. director could provide Mr. Comey’s defense with an avenue to protect him.Oct. 8, 2025, 11:01 a.m. ETThere has been discussion among legal commentators about whether the Trump’s administration’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan as U.S. attorney was invalid, in which case the indictment she obtained could be thrown out.The issue is that when there is a vacancy in the position, the attorney general is able install someone as an “interim” U.S. attorney for 120 days, but after that expires, the law says a federal court can decide who next serves as interim.The U.S. attorney who was removed for refusing to bring a case against Comey based on the available evidence, Erik Siebert, had already served a 120-day term as an attorney general appointment. The question is whether the Trump administration had the authority to make a second interim appointment.Oct. 8, 2025, 11:01 a.m. ETPatrick J. Fitzgerald, who is representing James B. Comey Jr., was a federal prosecutor in New York and then Chicago, where he successfully prosecuted the former Illinois governors George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich in corruption cases.Credit...Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York TimesPatrick J. Fitzgerald, who is representing the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey Jr., was himself once a prominent federal law enforcement official. At an arraignment on Wednesday morning, it was Mr. Fitzgerald who entered a plea of not guilty on Mr. Comey’s behalf.As a federal prosecutor in New York and then Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald played major roles in several important terrorism and corruption cases. He worked on Al Qaeda cases in New York in the 1990s, and later successfully prosecuted two governors of Illinois, George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich, in corruption cases.Mr. Fitzgerald achieved perhaps his highest profile during the Bush administration, when he was appointed as a special counsel to investigate the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Plame Wilson. The leak came during the debate over the Iraq War, and involved the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq was seeking to build weapons of mass destruction, an accusation that later proved to be wrong.As part of that case, Mr. Fitzgerald prosecuted the vice president’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice. He also had a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, jailed for initially refusing to testify about confidential source conversations in response to a subpoena.Mr. Fitzgerald is a longtime friend of Mr. Comey, who was also a Justice Department prosecutor before he became the director of the F.B.I. in 2013.Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey during the Russia investigation in 2017 and came to see him as an political adversary. Later Mr. Trump pardoned several of the people Mr. Fitzgerald had convicted in high-profile cases, including Mr. Blagojevich, Mr. Libby and Conrad Black, a conservative media mogul.Mr. Comey is also represented by Jessica Nicole Carmichael, an experienced criminal defense attorney. A former federal public defender, she has represented defendants in several terrorism cases that drew public attention.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:52 a.m. ETTwo days after his inauguration in 2017, President Trump spoke at a reception for law enforcement and first responders. James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time, stood at the far end of the room directly opposite Mr. Trump.Credit...Al Drago for The New York TimesIt was not, to say the least, a great start to their relationship. James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, arrived at Trump Tower two weeks before Donald J. Trump would be inaugurated in 2017. On the agenda was a briefing for the incoming president by Mr. Comey and the intelligence community chiefs on their finding that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to hurt Hillary Clinton.But Mr. Comey also planned to give the president-elect some even more awkward news.It was the first time they had met, and Mr. Comey’s message — that there was a document circulating in Washington full of salacious claims related to Mr. Trump and Russia — left Mr. Trump suspecting that the F.B.I. director was implicitly threatening him. Mr. Comey later said he believed he had no choice but to share the information, despite the possibility that Mr. Trump would take it as a demonstration of leverage over him.Even before that first fraught encounter, their fates had been entangled by Mr. Comey’s decision in the campaign’s closing days to publicly reopen an inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server, a choice that Democrats assailed and blamed for her defeat. And after the Trump Tower meeting, the two men would be set on a path of escalating conflict and mutual loathing that led last month to a prosecutor handpicked for the task by Mr. Trump securing an indictment of Mr. Comey.Mr. Trump sought to see Mr. Comey investigated and prosecuted for the better part of a decade, relentlessly pressing reluctant aides across two administrations to take action against a figure he sees as pivotal to the Russia investigation, which he has always cast as a “witch hunt” intended to delegitimize his victory in 2016.Mr. Comey, in turn, has for years been an outspoken critic of the president even as Trump and Clinton supporters alike have cast him as overzealous in how he used his power while leading the F.B.I.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:52 a.m. ETMiles Taylor, the former senior homeland security department official and co-author of an anonymous 2018 essay critical of President Trump, was spotted in the crowd outside the courthouse for Comey’s arraignment. Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate him earlier this year.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:46 a.m. ETMinho KimReporting from the courthouseThe government told the judge that it expects Comey’s trial to last two to three days. The defense lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, agreed to the government’s assessment but expressed confidence that his client would be able to dismiss the case based on the motions he intended to file alleging the wrongful appointment of Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. attorney leading the case, and on vindictive prosecution.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:38 a.m. ETIn the most significant development of the hearing, Patrick Fitzgerald, Comey’s lawyer, said he intended to file to motions to dismiss the case before trial: the first accusing the government of malicious and selective prosecution based on Trump’s public demand that Comey be prosecuted, the second seeking to challenge what he called the illegal appointment of Lindsey Halligan as U.S. attorney.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:35 a.m. ETA big takeaway from Comey’s arraignment is that the public — and Comey himself — still don’t know what he is specifically accused of doing. The sparse indictment said he authorized someone to leak information about an investigation, without saying who that was and what the investigation was. Comey’s lawyer told the judge that the prosecution has still not told them the specifics.This is, to say the least, one of several things that make this case — which President Trump pushed through, after a U.S. attorney was removed for refusing to bring it — highly unusual.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:33 a.m. ETMinho KimReporting from the courthouseThe defense will move to dismiss the case, arguing that the appointment of the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawful. That motion will be decided by another court, Judge Michael Nachmanoff said.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:27 a.m. ETThe arraignment is over. Comey was not taken into custody, and there are no conditions on his release.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:22 a.m. ETProsecutors also asked for a later trial in order to handle “a large amount of discovery which also includes classified information.”But the judge said he was “a little skeptical” about the lawyers’ insinuations that the case was complex enough to require extra time.“This does not appear to me to be an overly complicated case,” he said, adding: “I’m not going to force you to go to trial in December if both sides don’t feel they can be ready.”Oct. 8, 2025, 10:19 a.m. ETFitzgerald said that Comey’s defense team had proposed an extended schedule in the hopes they might avoid a trial altogether.“Frankly, we feel in this case the cart may have been put before the horse,” he said, adding: “We’d like certain dispositive motions addressed first in the hopes a trial can be avoided.”Oct. 8, 2025, 10:17 a.m. ETPatrick Fitzgerald, Comey’s lead attorney, said that the defense team’s “first substantive contact” with the prosecutors took place only Tuesday afternoon, and that there will still several aspects of the charges that needed to be clarified.“We still have not been told who Person 3 and Person 1 are,” he said, referring to the indictment. He later added: “We still haven’t been told precisely what is in count 1 or count 2.”Oct. 8, 2025, 10:16 a.m. ETHad the parties adhered to the speedy trial deadline, it would have set a trial date of no later than Dec. 17, which the judge indicated he would have granted. But Comey’s attorneys proposed an extended schedule, filing motions by Oct. 20, briefs by Nov. 20, and a trial date of Jan. 12.The judge proposed pushing the trial date up a week earlier, to Jan. 5, and they all agreed.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:13 a.m. ETThe judge has set a trial date of Jan. 5. That is later than a speedy trial deadline would have indicated, but both the prosecutors and Comey’s defense team had asked for more time, citing, among other concerns, the need to scrutinize classified materials related to the case.Oct. 8, 2025, 10:04 a.m. ETMinho KimReporting from the courthouseComey’s lawyer Patrick J. Fitzgerald entered the plea of not guilty. They requested a trial by jury.Oct. 8, 2025, 9:58 a.m. ETJames Comey, the former F.B.I. director, arrived early and was seated at the defendants’ table in the courtroom more than 20 minutes before his arraignment was scheduled to begin. The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, entered the courtroom at about 9:45 a.m., and shook hands with Comey’s attorneys.Oct. 8, 2025, 9:57 a.m. ETLindsey Halligan, who has largely spent her career handling insurance matters in Florida, has filed appearances in only a handful of federal cases during her decade in the law.Credit...Jacquelyn Martin/Associated PressLindsey Halligan, the lawyer chosen by President Trump to replace the ousted U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, has left no doubt about her willingness to lead a charge on his behalf.As one of his personal lawyers, Ms. Halligan, a go-for-the-jugular loyalist who is comfortable on television, denounced the F.B.I. when agents seized classified documents in 2022 from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida. As a White House special assistant, she has taken the lead in scrutinizing exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution for “improper ideology.”Lacking from her background altogether, however, is any experience in working as a prosecutor or overseeing the complex national security cases that regularly pass through the Eastern District of Virginia. Court records show that Ms. Halligan, who has largely spent her career handling insurance matters in Florida, has filed appearances in only a handful of federal cases during her decade in the law — all of them as one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.Despite her slender résumé, Mr. Trump declared last month that he planned to nominate Ms. Halligan, 36, to assume control of one of the country’s most important prosecutors’ offices at a moment of outsize disarray and tension: just after her predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, was forced out by the White House after failing to bring charges against two of the president’s perceived enemies. She’s filling in as the interim U.S. attorney now.Oct. 8, 2025, 9:55 a.m. ETMinho KimReporting from the courthouseThe U.S. District Court in Alexandria, where Comey is waiting to be arraigned, has very stringent rules on electronics. The public, including journalists, are not allowed to bring in any electronic devices bigger than a cell phone. But those phones must be put into a sealed pouch provided by the court that cuts off service and which can only be unsealed upon leaving the courthouse.Other courts in the Washington metro area allow devices to be brought in, although they must be turned off when the court comes to order.In order to send these updates, my colleagues and I have to go outside the building.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York TimesOct. 8, 2025, 9:53 a.m. ETAn agent in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office was suspended after he refused to organize an escort of uniformed law enforcement officials to walk Comey into the courthouse before the news media, according to people with knowledge of the move who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.It remains unclear how that would have worked. Comey has only been issued a summons to appear in court, although arrests are not unheard-of in such cases.Oct. 8, 2025, 9:48 a.m. ETThe federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., in September.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe federal judge who will oversee the case against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, has a long history of working in the courthouse where the charges were brought, first as a law clerk, then a public defender, and now a jurist.The random assignment of Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff of Federal District Court to the case sets the stage for a high-stakes trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Mr. Comey himself once worked as a prosecutor.Judge Nachmanoff, a Biden appointee, was confirmed in 2021 by senators including Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who led the congressional hearing in September 2020 that is now at the center of the two-count indictment against Mr. Comey.Mr. Comey is accused of lying to Congress when he denied authorizing anyone at the F.B.I. to share information anonymously with a reporter.In the mid-1990s, Judge Nachmanoff clerked for one of the most well-respected judges in Northern Virginia, Leonie Brinkema. After a number of years in private practice, he went to the federal public defender’s office and came to oversee it in 2005, a position he held for the next decade.Oct. 8, 2025, 9:41 a.m. ETThe scene outside the courthouse was calm before Comey’s arraignment Wednesday, as television camera crews and photographers — and a few protesters — milled about the brick pavement in front of and opposite the courthouse, waiting for the former F.B.I. director’s arrival. Comey’s wife and family arrived well ahead of the 10 a.m. hearing.A few protesters gathered outside held signs protesting the charges and decrying what they framed as an assault on the justice system. The signs they carried included “Show trial,” “Trumped up charges,” and “Release the Epstein files.”Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York TimesCredit...Kenny Holston/The New York TimesOct. 8, 2025, 9:24 a.m. ETPresident Trump has been vocal about the Comey case, making it clear he wanted the former F.B.I. director to face charges.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York TimesEven before James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was indicted last month, legal experts were already questioning whether the case might be vulnerable to an uncommon but powerful legal attack: allegations that President Trump, who has long called for Mr. Comey to be jailed, had pushed the Justice Department into opening an improper vindictive prosecution.Such speculation gained at least a little steam after Mr. Trump recently weighed in on the charges, which center on whether Mr. Comey lied to Congress, in a manner that seemed to prejudge his guilt.“Whether you like Corrupt James Comey or not, and I can’t imagine too many people liking him, HE LIED!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last month. “It is not a complex lie, it’s a very simple, but IMPORTANT one. There is no way he can explain his way out of it.”The remarks by Mr. Trump were not the first time he had shared — or over-shared — his opinions about whether Mr. Comey should be prosecuted, evincing what defense lawyers may seek to argue was a political animus by the Justice Department.While vindictive prosecution motions are notoriously difficult to win, the president’s voluble vitriol and his incessant need to be on the attack could provide defense lawyers with an avenue to protect the very people he most wants to punish.Oct. 8, 2025, 9:09 a.m. ETJames B. Comey testified remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in September 2020.Credit...Pool photo by Stefani ReynoldsAt the center of the Trump administration’s indictment of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, is testimony he delivered before Congress in September 2020. But the details of the accusation against him remain murky because the indictment is extremely sparse. It was filed by a novice prosecutor installed last month by President Trump to lead the Eastern District of Virginia after her predecessor refused to bring the case.The indictment charges Mr. Comey with one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding.The false statement charge asserts that in appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, Mr. Comey told a U.S. senator that he “had not ‘authorized someone else at the F.B.I. to be an anonymous source in news reports’ regarding an F.B.I. investigation concerning” an unnamed person. But in fact, the indictment says, Mr. Comey had authorized someone to do so.The obstruction charge is even vaguer. It asserts that Mr. Comey made “false and misleading statements” before the committee, but offers no details.Here is a closer look at the indictment that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, obtained from a grand jury, along with a proposed charge that the jury rejected.Oct. 8, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ETJames Comey, the former F.B.I. director, in 2020.Credit...Jared Soares for The New York TimesThe proceedings at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday morning will have the superficial trappings of any other arraignment: The accused will stand before a judge, hear the charges against him and sign the paperwork.But the initial court appearance of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on charges of lying to Congress five years ago will be a highly unusual event with potentially enormous political and legal implications.The indictment of Mr. Comey, who ordered the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, represented the most significant legal action taken against those President Trump has publicly targeted for retribution.The case was presented to a grand jury on Sept. 25 — over the opposition of prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia — by Lindsey Halligan, a White House official hastily installed by Mr. Trump as U.S. attorney after her predecessor found insufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey.It came shortly after the president all but commanded Attorney General Pam Bondi to take legal action against Mr. Comey; Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat; and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.“Nothing is being done,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.”Mr. Comey faces up to five years in prison if convicted, though many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove — if his lawyers do not succeed in getting the charges quickly dismissed.“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way,” Mr. Comey said in a video released hours after he was charged.“We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either,” added Mr. Comey, who has assembled a formidable defense team, including Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the former U.S. attorney in Chicago known for prosecuting major terrorism and corruption cases.The arraignment was originally scheduled for Thursday, but the chief judge of the district court moved it up a day, citing logistical and security concerns.The visuals of vengeance are of great importance to Mr. Trump, who rose to national prominence as a reality television star who often watched his broadcasts with the sound off to better judge how he looked.An agent in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office was suspended after he refused to organize an escort of uniformed law enforcement officials to walk Mr. Comey into the courthouse before the media, according to people with knowledge of the move who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.It remains unclear how that would have worked. Thus far, Mr. Comey has only been issued a summons to appear in court, although arrests are not unheard-of in such cases.In 2022, Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump adviser, was taken into custody and handcuffed as he boarded an airplane in Washington, an action criticized as overly aggressive by the judge in his case.Ms. Halligan, who narrowly secured a two-count indictment after a shaky solo appearance before the grand jury, has had a hard time getting anyone in her new office to help her with the case, according to current and former prosecutors in the office.Two prosecutors who work in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Tyler Lemons and Gabriel Diaz, gave official notice on Tuesday that they had been assigned to the case, according to court records.The case has cast a corrosive pall over the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the most important federal prosecutor’s offices in the nation.Erik S. Siebert, the district’s former U.S. attorney, came under pressure from Mr. Trump after telling his superiors in the Justice Department that there was not enough evidence against Mr. Comey or, in a separate potential case, Ms. James. Mr. Siebert quit on Sept. 19, hours after the president called for his ouster.Since then, Trump Justice Department appointees have fired without cause two top career prosecutors who also objected to the Comey indictment. Many other officials in the Eastern District of Virginia have applied for jobs on the outside or have written memos justifying their actions in case they have to contest personnel actions or sue the department.The bare-bones, two-page indictment against Mr. Comey was signed only by Ms. Halligan, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who had been serving as a midlevel lawyer in the office of the White House staff secretary.Mr. Comey was indicted on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.Court records indicate that Ms. Halligan also tried to get the grand jury to indict Mr. Comey on a second false statement charge, which was rejected.Mr. Comey is not the first former head of the F.B.I. to face criminal charges. In 1978, a former acting head of the bureau during Watergate, L. Patrick Gray, was indicted on charges of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans.Prosecutors said he authorized agents to break into homes without warrants, in a hunt for fugitive members of Weather Underground, the violent far-left group.The charges against Mr. Gray were dropped two years later.