Former FBI director James Comey says he is innocent, after being indicted on two charges by a grand jury.
On Thursday, local time, in Virginia, he was indicted on one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice.
"My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I am innocent, so let's have a trial and keep the faith," Mr Comey said in a video message posted to Instagram.
US President Donald Trump celebrated the grand jury indictment in a social media post.
"One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI," he wrote.
"Today he was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts for various illegal and unlawful acts.
"He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation."
Mr Comey is expected to surrender on Friday morning local time, according to a CNN reporter.
The grand jury's indictment came after Mr Trump mentioned Mr Comey by name in a social media post chiding Attorney-General Pam Bondi for not moving quickly enough to bring criminal charges against his most prominent antagonists, writing: "JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW."
Mr Trump fired Mr Comey in 2017, early in the Republican president's first term in office.
He has since regularly assailed Mr Comey's handling of the FBI investigation that detailed contacts between Russians and Trump's 2016 campaign.
Since he returned to office in January, Mr Trump's Justice Department has been examining Mr Comey's 2020 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee when he addressed Republican criticisms of the Russia investigation and denied that he had authorised disclosures of sensitive information to the news media.
The case against Mr Comey, who served as FBI director from 2013 until 2017, marked the starkest example of the Trump administration using its law enforcement power against a prominent critic after the president promised retribution during his successful 2024 election campaign.
"No one is above the law," Ms Bondi said in a post on X shortly after the news broke.
Without specifically mentioning Mr Comey, she added: "Today's indictment reflects this Department of Justice's commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case."
The effort to target Mr Comey has been viewed with scepticism in the Eastern District of Virginia, the US attorney's office handling the case.
The district's top federal prosecutor, Erik Siebert, resigned last week after drawing Mr Trump's wrath for expressing doubts about the strength of the case.
Some other prosecutors in the office have told Mr Siebert's successor, Lindsey Halligan, that charges should not be filed due to lack of evidence, according to one of the sources.
The grand jury declined to indict Mr Comey on a third proposed charge, which related to him making a false statement to Congress in a different part of his Senate testimony stemming from a question related to the 2016 presidential election, court records show.
Ms Halligan most recently served as a White House adviser, and before that was one of Mr Trump's personal defence lawyers.
Mr Comey's son-in-law, Troy Edwards, resigned as a federal prosecutor minutes after the former FBI director was indicted.
Mr Edwards quit his job "to uphold my oath to the Constitution and the country," he wrote in a one-sentence resignation letter addressed to Ms Halligan.
He was the deputy chief of the National Security Section, a prestigious role in a US attorney's office that covers the Pentagon and CIA headquarters, handling some of the highest-profile espionage cases.
He was on the team of prosecutors who convicted Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes of orchestrating a violent plot to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to keep Mr Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election.
Mr Edwards was watching from the front row of the courtroom gallery when his wife's father was indicted on Thursday evening, local time.
Years of acrimony
Mr Trump and Mr Comey have had an acrimonious relationship since the start of the president's first term in 2017, when he fired the FBI director days after Mr Comey publicly confirmed that the president was under investigation over his election campaign's connections to Russia.
Mr Comey then emerged as a prominent critic of the president, calling him "morally unfit" for office.
That firing led to the appointment of another former FBI chief, Robert Mueller, as a special counsel to take charge of the Russia probe, which unearthed numerous contacts between the campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was not enough evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy.
Mr Trump repeatedly attacked the investigation as a "witch-hunt", and his second administration has sought to undermine conclusions by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
A Justice Department internal watchdog found evidence of numerous errors but no political bias concerning the FBI's opening of the investigation.
Republicans have long claimed that the investigation was intended to undermine Mr Trump's first administration.
Prosecutors detail concerns
Ms Halligan had rushed to present the case to a grand jury this week, before the five-year statute of limitations expired.
The push to move forward came even as prosecutors in the office had detailed in a memo concerns about the pursuit of an indictment.
Mr Trump has seized on the fact that Mr Mueller's investigation did not find that his campaign and the Kremlin colluded, and that there were significant errors and omissions made by the FBI in wire tap applications, to claim vindication.
An investigation, lasting years, into potential misconduct during the Russia investigation was conducted by a different special counsel, John Durham.
That produced three criminal cases, including against an FBI lawyer, but not against senior government officials.
The criminal case against Mr Comey does not concern the substance of the Russia investigation but accuses him of having lied to a Senate committee in his 2020 appearance when he said he never authorised anyone to serve as an anonymous source to a reporter about the investigation.
Mr Trump's administration is trying to cast the Russia investigation as the outgrowth of an effort under Democratic president Barack Obama to overhype Moscow's interference in the election and to undermine the legitimacy of Mr Trump's victory.
Documents declassified
Administration officials, including CIA director John Ratcliffe and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, have declassified a series of documents meant to chip away at the strength of an Obama-era intelligence assessment published in January 2017 that said Moscow had engaged in a broad campaign of interference at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mr Comey was a senior Justice Department official in Republican President George W Bush's administration, then was picked by Mr Obama to lead the FBI in 2013 and was director when the bureau opened the Russia investigation.
Mr Comey's relationship with Mr Trump was strained from the start and was exacerbated when he resisted a request at a private White House dinner to pledge personal loyalty to the president.
That overture so unnerved the FBI director that he documented it in a contemporaneous memorandum.
After being fired, Mr Comey authorised a close friend to share with a reporter the substance of an unclassified memo that documented an Oval Office request from Mr Trump to shut down an FBI investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
Mr Trump and his allies later branded Mr Comey a leaker, with the president even accusing him of treason.
Mr Comey has called Trump "ego-driven" and likened him to a mafia don.
The Justice Department, during Mr Trump's first term, declined to prosecute Mr Comey over his handling of his memos.
The department's inspector general did issue a harshly critical report in 2019 that said Mr Comey violated FBI policies, including by failing to return documents to the FBI after he was dismissed and for sharing them with his personal lawyers without FBI permission.
Earlier this year, the department fired Mr Comey's daughter, Maurene Comey, from her job as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
She has since sued, saying the termination was carried out without any explanation and was done for political reasons.
