City Castles

FORMER FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY CHARGED UNDER THE ESPIONAGE ACT On October 5, 2026, the Justice Department filed a two-count "criminal information" charging former FBI Director James Comey with transmitting and conspiring to transmit national defense information against James Comey in federal court in Washington, D.C. Judge Trevor McFadden unsealed it on October 26, 2026. Count one is 18 U.S.C. § 793(d), transmitting national defense information to a person not entitled to receive it. Count two is § 793(g), conspiracy. Section 793 is the statute Jack Smith used on President Trump, who was completely innocent. In June 2023 Smith charged Trump in Fort Pierce, Florida, with 31 counts under § 793(e) for keeping his own papers in his own house. Judge Aileen Cannon threw the case out on July 15, 2024. President Trump was unfairly charged for keeping documents he had a right to keep. Comey is charged for handing a FISA court secret to the New York Times. The leak is dated October 5, 2016. On October 4, 2016, Reuters reported that Yahoo had scanned its customers’ email for the United States government. The next day Charlie Savage of the New York Times published the corrected version, citing two government officials: a FISA court order had required Yahoo to search for a signature used by a foreign terrorist organization. The prosecutors say Comey directed his staff to speak to Savage to correct Reuters, and that the correction was classified. They say the Times story tracked talking points emailed to about thirty officials less than four hours before it ran. Comey’s lawyers answer that the leak was “merely the talking points.” Both sides agree on one thing: the Times printed the government’s talking points. The "criminal information" does not name the staff. Comey’s own lawyers do. Their filings of October 16 and October 27, 2026, name James A. Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, as the man who spoke to the Times. John Durham identified Baker as a source in 2017. Baker’s account: Comey’s chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, told him to do it, and Baker understood the order came from Comey. The Department looked at this leak twice, in December 2018 and January 2020, with Baker’s account in the file, and closed it both times. Count two, the conspiracy count, reaches past Comey. A conspiracy is an agreement. The information says Comey acted “through one or more co-conspirators” to have Individual #1 disclose national defense information to a reporter. Individual #1 is Baker. The co-conspirators are the people between Comey and Baker: Rybicki, who carried the order, and the officials who drafted the talking points that afternoon. Baker has already told a court who else was in the agreement. Under oath at the Sussmann trial in May 2022, he said the Director of the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence authorized the disclosure. The Director of the FBI was Comey. The DNI was James Clapper. Three months later, on January 6, 2017, the same two men were in Trump Tower briefing President-elect Trump, and Comey stayed behind to tell him about the Steele dossier. Within four days the dossier was in the press. On September 19, 2016, Baker took the Alfa Bank material from Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. Two weeks later Baker was handing the New York Times a FISA secret on the Director’s instruction. Three weeks after that, on October 21, 2016, Comey signed the FISA application on Carter Page, built on Christopher Steele’s fabrications. Christopher Wray’s FBI investigated Comey’s other leak to the New York Times, the April 22, 2017 article defending his handling of the Clinton email case, as ARCTIC HAZE from August 14, 2017. The file records that Comey had Daniel Richman hired as a special government employee with a Top Secret clearance so that Comey could discuss classified matters with someone outside the Bureau’s leadership, and used Richman as his liaison to the press. The team cut the suspect list to eight officials, mostly former FBI. All denied it. On June 29, 2021, Comey, through his lawyer, allowed the FBI a limited search of his own iPhone. On September 9, 2021, with Wray still Director and Merrick Garland as Attorney General, the Bureau closed the case without charges, noting that the Department does not as a rule prosecute officials who merely confirm secrets to reporters. On October 9, 2026, the government’s lawyer told Judge McFadden he had wanted to indict Comey that day and had booked the grand jury to do it. The Department agreed to wait thirty days. The thirty days end on November 8, 2026. One of the three prosecutors on the case, Justin Silverberg, comes from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, the office running the Fort Pierce grand jury on the Grand Conspiracy. My book, The Grand Conspiracy, grandconspiracybook.com, has the whole cast: Comey, Baker, Clapper, Rybicki, and what the FBI was really doing in October 2016.

Comey, who is undeniably guilty, is charged under the same Espionage Act statute Jack Smith used against President Trump, who was entirely innocent. The charges reach beyond Comey: then-DNI Jim Clapper allegedly authorised his leaks of classified information to the media. And the Florida prosecutors investigating the Grand Conspiracy are involved in this case. Expect it to be rolled into the bigger conspiracy case.