DOJ issued grand jury subpoena to Comey associate Daniel Richman in revived leak investigation

On August 31, 2026, federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida issued a grand jury subpoena requiring Daniel Richman, a longtime friend and legal adviser to former FBI Director James Comey, to testify in a renewed investigation into whether Comey improperly shared sensitive information with the media. The subpoena revives long-standing allegations that after Trump fired Comey as FBI director in 2017, Comey shared a memo describing his conversations with the president with Richman, who then shared its contents with a New York Times reporter. Richman has said the memo's contents were not marked classified and, to his knowledge, remain unclassified.

The subpoena is the first sign that prosecutors have widened the investigation beyond John Brennan, the former CIA director whose own prosecution the same Southern District of Florida office has separately pursued. Career prosecutors in the district had resisted pursuing a "grand conspiracy" theory favored by Trump allies; Joe DiGenova, a former U.S. Attorney aligned with Trump, took over leadership of the investigation in recent months after publicly stating he believed the broader case was supported by evidence. The underlying leak allegations were previously examined by the Justice Department's inspector general and by Special Counsel John Durham, whose investigation criticized some officials' decisions but did not find evidence supporting criminal charges against Comey or Richman.

Comey already faces two federal charges over a social media post prosecutors characterize as a threat against Trump, and previously faced charges of making false statements to Congress that a judge dismissed. Both of those cases involved Comey's communications with Richman, the same communications now under renewed grand jury scrutiny. If prosecutors bring charges arising from this subpoena, it would mark the department's third attempt to prosecute Comey during the current administration.