The Daniel Richman lawsuit is a Rule 41(g) return-of-property action that Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman filed against the United States in late November 2025, arguing that the Justice Department had violated the Fourth Amendment by holding his seized electronic files for years and then searching them again without a warrant to build a case against his longtime friend, former FBI Director James Comey. A federal judge in Washington agreed, ordered the data returned, and in doing so cut off what prosecutors had treated as the core evidence in the Comey indictment.
Who Richman Is and Why His Data Was in DOJ Hands
Richman teaches federal criminal law and surveillance at Columbia Law School and previously served about seven years as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. He has known Comey for roughly thirty years and has acted as both personal attorney and adviser to him. From 2015 through early 2017, he held an unpaid Special Government Employee appointment at the FBI.
His public role in the Comey story began in June 2017, when Comey testified that he had asked Richman to share the contents of an unclassified memo about private conversations with President Trump with a New York Times reporter. A 2019 DOJ Inspector General report found Comey had violated FBI policy in handling certain memos but concluded none of what he shared through Richman was classified, and the department declined to prosecute at that time.
How the Government Got the Files
The DOJ first obtained an image of Richman’s personal hard drive in 2017, when he voluntarily allowed the FBI to copy it during the investigation that followed Comey’s firing. In 2019 and 2020, under a separate national security leak probe code-named “Arctic Haze,” investigators executed court-authorized search warrants and seized data from his hard drive, two email accounts including his Columbia address, and his Apple iCloud account.
Arctic Haze closed in 2021 without any charges. The government kept everything it had taken. Then, in September 2025, federal investigators searched the retained files again without a new warrant and used what they found to build the grand jury case that produced Comey’s indictment on September 25, 2025. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, reviewing the government’s conduct in the Comey case, described a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” and called Richman’s data the “cornerstone” of the grand jury presentation.
What Richman Asked the Court to Do
On November 26, 2025, two days after a separate ruling dismissed the Comey indictment on grounds unrelated to the evidence, Richman filed a motion for return of property under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(g) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The case went to Senior U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
Richman’s argument had two parts. The government’s ongoing possession and its warrantless 2025 search violated the Fourth Amendment. And the seized materials contained a large volume of attorney-client privileged communications between him and Comey that the government had accessed without any privilege screen.
The Court’s Rulings
Temporary Restraining Order
On December 6, 2025, Judge Kollar-Kotelly granted a temporary restraining order blocking the DOJ from accessing or using any of the seized data. She found Richman “likely to succeed on the merits” of his Fourth Amendment claim. The government was ordered to identify, segregate, and secure all copies of the hard drive image, the Columbia email data, and the iCloud data, along with anything derived from them, and to certify compliance by December 8. The order landed while the DOJ was actively weighing whether to seek a new Comey indictment.
Return of Property
Six days later, on December 12, 2025, the judge issued a 46-page memorandum opinion granting the return motion. She found prosecutors had acted with “callous disregard” for Richman’s constitutional rights and committed a “remarkable breach of protocol” by searching the files without a warrant to build a case against someone else.
The opinion adopted Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick’s findings that the government had exceeded the scope of the 2019 and 2020 warrants, had failed to separate responsive from non-responsive material, and had produced a “massive over-seizure of professional and personal data.” The September 2025 warrantless search compounded the violation, and the continuing retention amounted to an ongoing unreasonable seizure because nothing prevented further unlawful access.
Applying the Rule 41(g) balancing framework, Judge Kollar-Kotelly rejected the government’s claim that returning the data would improperly interfere with the Comey investigation. She credited Richman’s “compelling interest in controlling access to this material for his own private and professional purposes, including preserving his own privacy and his professional confidences.”
The order required the government to return all copies of the data to Richman. One narrow exception preserved a path for future prosecution: a single sealed copy was to be deposited with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where prosecutors could ask for access only by securing a valid search warrant under judicial supervision. Richman would have the right to move to quash any such warrant before it was executed.
The court declined one thing Richman had asked for. He had sought a blanket bar on the government ever using the materials in any future proceeding, and the judge would not go that far, leaving open the possibility of properly warranted access through the Virginia court.
The Government’s Attempt to Modify the Order
The DOJ moved on December 15 for clarification, changes, and more time to comply. On December 23 and 27, Judge Kollar-Kotelly largely denied those requests. She rejected a proposal to lodge copies with the DOJ’s own internal Litigation Security Group instead of the Virginia court, reaffirming that the government could not retain control over the data. She did allow deletion of one document that had been reclassified to a higher security level since 2017.
Court records show the case was formally terminated on April 21, 2026, with the last docket entry on May 22, 2026. The available records do not indicate that the DOJ appealed the return-of-property ruling.
What It Did to the Comey Prosecution
Richman’s suit closed off the government on two fronts at once. The original Comey indictment had already been dismissed without prejudice on November 24, 2025, when Senior U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s appointment was unlawful. That left prosecutors needing a fresh indictment. The Richman ruling then blocked access to the evidence that had anchored the first one.
Any renewed effort would have to go through the Eastern District of Virginia under the return order’s mechanism, subject to a new warrant, judicial review, and Richman’s right to move to quash. Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick and defense attorneys had also raised concerns that privileged attorney-client material may have been accessed during the warrantless search, an issue that could taint further use of what was gathered. The DOJ called Richman’s suit a “collateral motion” meant to “stymie a criminal prosecution.” The court treated it as a Fourth Amendment claim that succeeded on the merits.
In April 2026, the government indicted Comey a second time, but on unrelated charges in the Eastern District of North Carolina involving a 2025 Instagram post. That case remains pending. The false-statement theory built on Richman’s files was not revived.