In a recent legal development, James Comey’s legal team successfully challenged the government’s request for an extensive protective order. They persuaded the judge that imposing such constraints would unnecessarily impede Comey’s ability to mount a defense and adequately prepare for his trial.

Presiding over the matter, U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff acknowledged the importance of a fair trial. Though he recognized the government’s concerns about potentially inappropriate sharing of sensitive information, he ultimately ruled in favor of Comey, emphasizing the need for balanced justice.

The judge drew parallels to the case of Paul Manafort, where the late Judge T.S. Ellis III in the Eastern District of Virginia declined to approve a vague protective order. Such an order would have cast an overly broad veil of secrecy over evidence in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into bank and tax fraud involving Manafort.

Manafort was later convicted in the same district, receiving a 2019 sentence perceived by many as lenient before being granted a pardon by President Donald Trump in the following year.

Manafort, of course, went on to be convicted in the EDVA, received a sentence in 2019 that was criticized as lenient, and then received a pardon from President Donald Trump a year later.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former criminal defense attorney for Trump and Manafort, also helped defeat a New York State mortgage fraud prosecution against Manafort on double jeopardy grounds.

As recently as Monday, Comey’s attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald and Jessica Carmichael told the judge that the protective order sought by interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, through North Carolina-based federal prosecutors Tyler Lemons and Gabriel Diaz, was far too broad and applied to “almost all of discovery.”

The attorneys bristled at the notion that Comey, a former director of the FBI, “cannot be trusted with receiving discovery in his” false statement and obstruction case despite a “long career of distinguished government service at the highest levels.”

The defense added that the government’s preferred protective order placed Comey at a “severe and unnecessary disadvantage[.]”

Prosecutors had, on the other hand, asserted that the high-profile nature of the case and Comey’s remarks on social media defending his “innocence” made “restricting the use and dissemination of […] discovery” necessary, since both Comey and the prosecution “have an interest in a fair trial with impartial jurors[.]”

Read the protective order that is now in place.