Former FBI Director James Comey pleaded not guilty on Wednesday morning to federal criminal charges that President Donald Trump had sought.
Judge Michael Nachmanoff set Comey’s trial to begin on Jan. 5 in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.
Comey’s lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, and prosecutors said they expect that trial to last only two to three days.
Fitzgerald told Nachmanoff that he will soon file legal papers requesting that the case be tossed on the grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution, according to NBC News.
Comey is accused of making a false statement and obstruction of a congressional proceeding during testimony to a Senate committee in 2020.
Comey, who was fired as FBI director by Trump in 2017, is accused of lying during testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020.
That day, Comey denied authorizing someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about a probe of Hillary Clinton and her emails when she was the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.
Two federal prosecutors from North Carolina have been assigned to handle Comey’s case, which is seen as a sign that Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had difficulty getting prosecutors in her own office to work on the case.
Halligan was put in that job by Trump shortly after her predecessor, Erik Siebert, resigned under pressure from Trump following Siebert’s reported reluctance to seek a grand jury indictment of Comey.
On Wednesday, Fitzgerald told Nachmanoff that Halligan’s appointment was “unlawful,” according to NBC.
Fitzgerald also said he will soon file motions in court addressing what he called “abuse” of the grand jury that Halligan personally asked to indict Comey, and “outrageous government conduct.”
Nachmanoff and Fitzgerald pushed back against a prosecutor’s assertion that the case was complex and would involve a large amount of classified information and documents.
“We view this as a simple case,” Fitzgerald said.
Nachmanoff said, “This does not appear to me to be an overly complicated case.”
He warned the prosecutors that he would “not slow this case down because the government does not promptly turn everything over,” referring to the requirement that the prosecution turn over evidence related to the case to Comey’s defense team before trial.
Squabbles over the pace and amount of information exchanged in that process, known as “discovery,” often bog down criminal cases.
“The government is going to be under an enormous amount of pressure to figure out what actions need to be done here,” Nachmanoff said.
Comey, after being indicted in late September, said, “I am not afraid,” in an Instagram video response.
“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” Comey said in the video.
“But we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.”
