The subpoena of Daniel C. Richman is the latest move in a persistent campaign to go after James B. Comey, one of President Trump’s most reviled political adversaries who has already been indicted twice.
Page F5From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
DOJ subpoenas a Comey ally while paying $795,000 to the aide it fired for targeting Trump.
As it ran on the front
Two Justice Department items ran this week and they don't belong in the same paragraph unless you're reading for the money, so here's the money. The department issued a grand jury subpoena to Daniel Richman, described as a confidant of former FBI Director James Comey, according to the Times. Separately, the New York Post reported that an aide to New York Attorney General Letitia James — an aide accused of targeting Trump — was fired by the DOJ, and then won seven hundred ninety-five thousand dollars in a discrimination case against the department that fired him.
Line those up and you get a department that is simultaneously pursuing a new investigative thread against people adjacent to one perceived adversary, and paying out three-quarters of a million dollars because it fired someone over accusations tied to the same adversary, and lost. The subpoena is prospective — it's asking a court to compel testimony or documents. The settlement is retrospective — it's the department acknowledging, in the language a discrimination verdict requires, that the firing didn't hold up.…
…(cont) Seven hundred ninety-five thousand dollars is not a rounding error in a personnel budget. It's a specific number a court or a settlement process arrived at, which means somebody did the math on how much the termination cost, in back pay, damages, or both, and the department paid it rather than continuing to defend the firing. That is the department's own filing telling on the decision that preceded it.
None of this requires a theory about coordination between the subpoena and the settlement — they're different offices, different timelines, different legal postures, hon. What it requires is noticing that an institution capable of losing a $795,000 discrimination case over how it treated one employee accused of targeting a political figure is, in the same news cycle, opening a new investigative front involving people adjacent to a different political figure. The ledger doesn't need a motive column to be worth reading. It just needs both entries filed under the same institution, in the same month, and the number attached to the one that already resolved.
“Same Justice Department: subpoenaing a guy connected to Comey with one hand, cutting a $795,000 discrimination check with the other to a guy they fired for supposedly going after Trump. That's not consistency, that's a department settling with its own mistakes while opening new ones.”
“The subpoena to Mr. Richman and the discrimination settlement are entirely unrelated matters — one's a grand jury process, one's an employment dispute the department mishandled, so if anything this shows the current DOJ cleaning up — actually, the $795,000 was paid over a firing THEY made, not a prior administration's. I'll circle back.”
The receipts
Controversial AG Bureau Chief Shamiso Maswoswe claimed in a federal lawsuit that the first Trump administration discriminated against her at DOJ.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.