The person was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter and confirmed the indictment to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. The charge or charges against Comey were not immediately known.
His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment Tuesday.
“A child knows what that meant,” Trump said. “If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.”
The fact that the Justice Department pursued a new case against the ex-FBI director months after a separate and unrelated indictment was dismissed will likely spark defense claims that the Trump administration is going out of its way to target Comey, who had overseen the early months of an investigation into whether the Republican president’s 2016 campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the outcome of that year’s election.
Comey was the FBI director when Trump took office in 2017, having been appointed by then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and serving before that as a senior Justice Department official in President George W. Bush’s Republican administration.
But the relationship was strained from the start, including after Comey resisted a request by Trump at a private dinner to pledge his personal loyalty to the president — an overture that so unnerved the FBI director that he documented it in a contemporaneous memorandum.
The department, for instance, is also pursuing a criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, another key figure in the Russia investigation — one of Trump’s chief grievances and a saga that he and his supporters have long sought retaliation for.
CNN was the first to report the second indictment against Comey.
