BS BULLETIN:

• A federal grand jury issued a subpoena Monday to Daniel Richman, James Comey’s longtime friend, former attorney and adviser, according to multiple law-enforcement sources.
• The subpoena is part of a fresh Justice Department investigation into allegations that Comey leaked classified information to The New York Times.
• Richman has long acknowledged serving as Comey’s intermediary with the press, but has maintained that the Comey memos provided to him did not bear classified markings.

James Comey’s old leak controversy just came roaring back to life.

A federal grand jury issued a subpoena Monday to Daniel Richman, Comey’s longtime friend and adviser, as the Justice Department launches a fresh investigation into allegations that the former FBI director leaked classified information to The New York Times, multiple law-enforcement sources told Fox News Digital.

And Richman isn’t some peripheral figure in the Comey saga.

He’s the Columbia law professor and former federal prosecutor whom Comey famously used as an intermediary to get information from his private Trump memos into the press after President Trump fired him as FBI director in 2017.

Comey openly acknowledged the arrangement during congressional testimony.

“My judgment was I needed to get that out into the public square,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, explaining that he had asked a friend to share the substance of a memo with a reporter.

That friend was Richman.

Comey also testified that one purpose of the disclosure was his hope that it “might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”

It did.

Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel shortly afterward.

Now, nearly a decade later, Richman is back in the sights of federal investigators.

Fox reports that Monday’s subpoena indicates DOJ has opened a new investigation into the alleged disclosure of classified information to the Times. The issue had been investigated during Trump’s first administration.

There is an important distinction here. The Justice Department inspector general previously investigated Comey’s handling of seven memos documenting his interactions with Trump and concluded that Comey violated FBI policies and his employment agreement by retaining and sharing sensitive FBI information. The inspector general also determined that Comey provided Richman with copies of four memos and instructed him to disclose the contents of one of them to a New York Times reporter. But the OIG found that the memo Comey specifically instructed Richman to disclose did not contain classified information.

Richman himself has consistently disputed suggestions that Comey handed him classified material.

“No [Comey] memos given to me had any classified markings,” Richman told ABC News in 2017, adding that he had read portions of one memo to a Times reporter.

Sen. Chuck Grassley said in 2018 that after reviewing all seven Comey memos in a secure facility, four were classified at the “SECRET” or “CONFIDENTIAL” levels. Grassley questioned whether Richman’s reported possession of four memos meant at least one contained classified information.

That history is now getting a fresh examination.

And Richman’s relationship with federal investigators has become even more complicated.

He previously challenged the government’s handling of material copied from his electronic devices during earlier Comey investigations. A federal judge ruled in Richman’s favor last December in a dispute over searches of that material, finding Fourth Amendment problems with the government’s later use of files obtained under previous warrants.

Monday’s subpoena therefore appears to mark a new investigative step rather than simply recycling paperwork from the old probe.

Comey is already fighting on multiple legal fronts. The Justice Department subpoenaed Comey earlier this year regarding his role in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference.

Fox reports that the new Richman investigation is separate from the case involving Comey’s controversial “86 47” social-media post and alleged threats against Trump.

So the man who spent years at the center of the FBI’s Trump investigations now has federal investigators retracing one of the most consequential episodes of his own tenure:

Who gave what to the press — and was any of it classified?

DBS WIRE SOURCES

• New federal grand jury subpoena issued to former James Comey advisor in leak investigation: sources — Fox News
• DOJ OIG releases report on former FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure and handling of memoranda — DOJ Office of Inspector General
• Friend of former FBI Director James Comey subpoenaed in federal probe — ABC News
• Grassley presses Justice Department about classification of Comey memos — U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
• DOJ subpoenas ex-FBI Director James Comey over role in 2017 Russia intelligence assessment — Fox News