Former FBI Director James Comey has been charged by federal prosecutors with transmission of national defense information and conspiracy to transmit national defense information.

It’s the third federal case against Comey, who has been a longtime Trump target since he initiated the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The case has played out under seal since Oct. 5.

Last week, Comey’s defense attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him. Comey has not been indicted in the case.

A federal appeals court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s unprecedented attempt to force California to set aside votes from 20,000 people it claims are noncitizens.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit in California, filed earlier this month, is part of its escalating effort to insert the federal government into how states run their elections.

A three-judge panel on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Justice Department’s emergency appeal following arguments in an unusual emergency Sunday hearing held via Zoom.

Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Judge Gabrial Sanchez, a Biden appointee, ruled that the appeals court did not have the authority to rule on the DOJ lawsuit before the district court had addressed the matter.

“The United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one,” the majority wrote. “At least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief.”

A third judge on the panel, Trump appointee Judge Patrick Bumatay, dissented.

The decision sends the case back to the US District Court in California, where a Tuesday hearing is scheduled at 4 p.m. ET.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking to prevent officials in California from counting more than 20,000 mail-in ballots associated with people the federal government says it believes are likely noncitizens. DOJ appealed to the 9th Circuit after the district court judge did not issue a ruling last week ahead of Tuesday’s hearing.

Two Democratic senators who have long overseen US intelligence say the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters that let intelligence analysts pull Americans’ messages from intercepted data without the approvals, written justifications, or records the law requires. The court approved another year of surveillance anyway. The ruling has never been made public, and Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California say the administration’s own deadline for releasing it passed in September.

The program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), lapsed in June after Congress failed to renew it, though collection continues under the court’s March approval. The administration’s own public documentation says rulings like this one are reviewed for public release “within 180 days of issuance.” That window closed September 13, even as intelligence officials press lawmakers to reauthorize the program by the end of the year.

Wyden, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Schiff, the former chair of its House counterpart, say the administration owes Congress an explanation for the delay, and the names of the officials responsible, by November 6.

“If this administration won’t follow this simple statutory directive,” the senators told Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche in a demand letter obtained exclusively by WIRED, “it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.”

Outside Congress, Demand Progress and 22 other civil liberties and government accountability groups on Monday urged congressional leaders to refuse to reauthorize Section 702 “while the administration actively withholds legally mandated information about how the surveillance program operates.” Signatories range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative-backed Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability.

The Trump administration has already been pressed, and has promised, to release the ruling. In April, senators Tom Cotton and Mark Warner, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican chair and Democratic vice chair, pressed the administration to release it within 15 days so it could inform the Senate’s debate. In July, asked in writing whether he would commit to declassifying it by the 180-day deadline, Blanche replied, “Yes.”

Warner “has been clear that he supports transparency with regard to Section 702,” his communications director, Rachel Cohen, tells WIRED. Neither former director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard nor Bill Pulte, who briefly replaced her as acting director, “were responsive,” Cohen says, “but Senator Warner expects that DNI Clayton will declassify the opinion, consistent with the bipartisan letter and as required by law.”

Cotton’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the US Justice Department did not answer questions WIRED sent Friday about the delay.

Clayton, who is legally responsible as director of national intelligence for declassifying the ruling, has made no such promise. Asked before his July confirmation whether he would ensure the opinion was public before Congress voted on reauthorization, he wrote only that the government was “working arduously to expeditiously declassify” it and had made the full opinion available to lawmakers.

Some of what the court found is already known. A FISA court opinion declassified last year described a similar FBI tool, a “participants filter” that let agents select people in contact with surveillance targets and read their messages. In February 2025, the Justice Department’s National Security Division told the court the tool had been running searches no one counted. The FBI shut it off the next month and switched it back on later that year, after the department approved a rebuilt version.

This year’s ruling went beyond that. The court found that tools agencies use to narrow intercepted data to an American’s messages amount to searches of Americans, subject to the same limits, and ordered them rebuilt, The New York Times reported in April, citing unclassified administration talking points sent to lawmakers. Senator Alex Padilla said in a written question to Blanche that the Justice Department “is appealing portions” of the ruling “limiting the government’s use of certain filtering tools.”

While the ruling stayed secret, seven intelligence agency fact sheets from March 2026, one dated the day of the ruling, cited a 98.9 percent compliance rate for FBI searches of Americans and credited Section 702 with stopping a planned terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. None mentions the court’s findings. The figure appears nowhere in the Justice Department inspector general’s October 2025 review of those searches, which put the compliance rate at 98.6 percent and could not conclude that “the FBI’s querying compliance issues are entirely in the past.”

According to the fact sheets, FBI auditors review every such search. FBI director Kash Patel closed the bureau’s Office of Internal Auditing last May and moved its auditors into another division. The bureau’s search counts before 2025 also omit queries run through the participants filter, searches the government’s own privacy watchdog says are “not possible to track.”

Lawmakers who have read the ruling hint that it says more. Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, urged colleagues on the Senate floor in June to read it in a secure room. “I have seen it,” he said. Once they did, he told them, “your opinion of the role of FISA and the rights of Americans will be impacted for sure.”

Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”

The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators. The court’s current approval of the program expires in March.

Surveillance reform advocates say the administration may try to avoid that fight by attaching a renewal to the annual defense authorization bill, which Congress usually finalizes in December. In 2023, lawmakers extended Section 702 for four months through that year’s defense bill after a Senate effort to strip the provision failed. This year’s House and Senate versions of the bill do not yet include it.

Judge Jesse Furman said that Comey, who was an assistant US attorney for a decade, was illegally fired in July 2025 despite her work on some of the nation’s highest-profile cases and consistently receiving “the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike”.

He said the government’s claim that Congress is barred from regulating the removal of federal prosecutors “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent”.

Furman added: “Indeed, to accept Defendants’ argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.”

The judge granted Comey retroactive reinstatement and back pay from the date of her firing through 20 December to “make her whole” and ensure that she doesn’t suffer adverse employment consequences for the “unlawful termination”.

A federal appeals court panel appeared deeply skeptical of the Trump administration’s request that it pre-empt a lower court and order California to set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots the federal government claims were sent to noncitizens.

The court held a hearing on Sunday that provided an early glimpse of how the administration’s claims might hold up under scrutiny, after state officials investigating the allegations cast doubt on the notion that thousands of ballots had been mistakenly sent to ineligible voters. The Trump administration has aggressively attempted to delay the counting of votes in several states and has moved to intervene in Alaska’s Senate race in what critics say is a broader attempt to sway the results of midterm elections just nine days away.

Two of the three judges hearing the challenge indicated they were uncomfortable intervening as the administration has requested, especially as a Justice Department lawyer struggled to answer questions about how the government concluded that the people it identified were both noncitizens and had been sent a ballot.

Matthew Donnelly, the administration lawyer, said with minimal details that the Trump administration had been “supplied a list” of California voters that was “purchased” from the state by an unnamed third party. He said the government then went through a “rigorous process” using third-party software to compare the voter data it obtained against its own citizenship data.

Judge Mark J. Bennett, a Trump appointee, asked whether election workers would be justified under state law in refusing to disqualify certain voters without “extraordinary proof” by the federal government. He pointed to a sworn statement by an election systems worker in Los Angeles who said that attempting to filter out the ballots of people the Trump administration flagged would have a “catastrophic impact” on their ability to handle the election.

“You’re asking us to take what you’re saying as fact, as opposed to what the I.T. guy is saying, and with no fact finding by the district court?” he asked.

The judges also indicated they may decline to step in immediately, sending the case back to the federal judge hearing it. The Justice Department could then appeal again, if it were to challenge a concrete ruling from the district judge.

The Trump administration had asked the court to expedite the case, arguing that the lower court judge’s pace on its requests effectively amounted to a denial of its request to set aside the ballots it is contesting. At the government’s urging, the district judge presiding over the case, Judge David O. Carter, had scheduled a hearing on Tuesday to consider its case.

But on Sunday, Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, a Biden appointee, also pressed Mr. Donnelly on why the number of noncitizens the Trump administration was alleging were registered to vote had shrunken drastically in recent months.

The Trump administration had said in July that as many as 190,000 noncitizens were unlawfully registered to vote. Judge Sanchez added that directing the state to set aside mail-in ballots from people on the administration’s list, relying only on the names and address on the envelopes, could lead to lawful voters with the same name having their ballots pulled out.

A third judge, Patrick J. Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, appeared more receptive to the administration’s arguments. But he questioned Mr. Donnelly about whether it might be too close to the election for the courts to order new procedures.

Mr. Donnelly maintained throughout that the panel could issue a ruling even while Judge Carter had taken steps to meet the government’s aggressive timetable. He asked the judges to rule “as soon as possible.”

Japanese prosecutors have indicted a US Marine on suspicion of murdering and robbing a woman in Okinawa earlier this month, multiple Japanese media outlets have reported, in a case that has prompted renewed outrage over the conduct of US troops in the country.

Lance Corporal Devin Jacob Ballard, a 20-year-old Marine assigned to the III Marine Expeditionary Force at Futenma Air Station, is charged with killing a woman by strangling her with a phone cord at a hotel in Naha, Okinawa’s capital, and stealing her backpack containing a wallet, public broadcaster NHK and others, reported on Sunday.

CNN has reached out to the US Marine Corps and the III Marine Expeditionary Force for comment.

Anna Yagi, 39, was found unresponsive in her hotel room and pronounced dead at the scene on the morning of October 3, Okinawa police previously told CNN, adding the cause of death was suffocation. Ballard was arrested less than 24 hours later while walking around the city, police said.

CNN is working to determine Ballard’s legal representation. The prosecutors have not disclosed whether the suspect has admitted or denied the charges, according to NHK. Okinawa police previously told CNN Ballard denied the charges.

The Naha District Public Prosecutors Office declined to comment on the case to CNN on Monday.

The case against Ballard is the latest in a string of allegations against US personnel in Okinawa, which has been the site of longstanding anger and protests over the American presence on the island chain. Okinawa hosts several US military facilities and is home to about 30,000 US troops and their families.

Ballard’s arrest sparked local protests and condemnation from politicians and leaders in Japan, including Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who said her government “strongly protested” to the US and called for “thorough discipline among US military personnel, and comprehensive measures to prevent the recurrence of crimes and accidents.”

Okinawa Governor Genta Koja said the alleged murder “leaves us no choice but to conclude that the US military’s efforts in maintaining discipline, educating personnel, and other such measures are completely ineffective.”

Following Ballard’s arrest, US troops on the island were placed under a monthlong curfew and were required to undertake training on “standards, discipline, and our responsibilities as members of the Okinawan community.”

Last year, US Marine Lance Corporal Jamel Clayton, 22, was sentenced to seven years in prison after he was convicted of strangling and sexually assaulting a woman in Okinawa. In 2024, US Air Force member Brennon R. E. Washington, 25, was sentenced to five years for kidnapping and raping an underage girl.

In 2016, tens of thousands of people demonstrated calling for an end to the US military presence on Okinawa following the killing of a local woman by a civilian worker stationed at the US Kadena Air Base.