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A federal judge has been assigned to preside over fired FBI Director James Comey’s case after the Justice Department issued new charges against him late last month. U.S. District Judge Louise W. Flanagan of the Eastern District of North Carolina was appointed by George W. Bush and is considered to be right-leaning, according to Ballotpedia.
Flanagan received a random case assignment on Tuesday after a grand jury indicted Comey on charges alleging that he threatened Trump by posting a photo on Instagram that featured seashells arranged in an “86 47” pattern in May 2025.
She has presided over thousands of cases throughout her tenure as an Article III judge. The U.S. Senate confirmed her as a federal district court judge in July 2003. Prior to this, she served as a federal magistrate judge and worked at the law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in Washington, D.C., before it merged with Dentons, the ABA Journal reports.
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In an interview last weekend, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made it clear that Comey’s indictment was the result of a year-long investigation and had much more to it than his seashells photo posted to Instagram.
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“Every case requires an investigation, and what you just showed is one part of that investigation. What you just showed is the Instagram post,” he told Fox News.
“Rest assured that the career Assistant United States Attorneys in North Carolina, the career FBI agents, the career Secret Service agents that investigated this case didn’t just look at the Instagram post and walk away,” he continued.
“That’s why you saw an indictment last week, notwithstanding the fact that it was last May that the post was made. So I am not permitted to get into details of what the grand jury heard or found, as you know, but rest assured that it’s not just the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted,” Blanche added.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have revived a dormant investigation into whether Comey illegally leaked classified information to a trusted media cutout, two people familiar with the matter said, creating a third active criminal front against the longtime Trump antagonist.
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The case centers on Comey’s decision to hand over sensitive memos documenting his private conversations with then-President Donald Trump to Columbia University Law Professor Daniel Richman, who then fed the material to The New York Times. The disclosures formed the basis of a May 2017 front-page story that fueled the Russia collusion narrative early in Trump’s first term.
This is James Comey in February 2020 talking to his friend Daniel Richman.
Comey said that Daniel Richman’s leaks (on Comey’s behalf) hastened the appointment of a special counsel.
Fast forward to today and a corrupt democrat operative in a robe ruled that evidence linked to… pic.twitter.com/iX0T1lPFvt
— The Researcher (@listen_2learn) December 12, 2025
The probe, if it results in charges, would mark the Trump Justice Department’s third indictment of Comey since last fall — on top of a Florida review of a broader conspiracy case and a fresh North Carolina grand-jury indictment returned April 28 for an alleged social-media threat against the president.
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Sources described active meetings in recent weeks between Blanche’s deputy office and a small team of EDVA prosecutors. The department has not yet decided whether to seek an indictment in Virginia, where Comey lives, or shift the case to New York, where Richman resides.
Timing remains unclear, but the renewed push reflects heightened pressure inside the Trump DOJ to reopen matters the president has repeatedly called out as examples of a politicized “deep state.”
The development carries particular irony. In the earlier Mar-a-Lago documents case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, the Justice Department and FBI insisted that any document they labeled “classified” was off-limits to judicial review or disclosure to the defendant. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that classification status is whatever the executive branch’s national-security apparatus says it is.
That precedent now applies with full force to Comey’s memos. If the current DOJ and intelligence community deem the documents classified — because they memorialize the president’s discussions on ongoing national-security matters — Comey’s defense that the memos were never classified collapses under the same legal standard his allies once championed.
