A federal judge ordered the Justice Department on Friday to get rid of a critical trove of evidence it used in September to bring charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, saying that prosecutors had obtained the materials unlawfully.
The decision by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Federal District Court in Washington complicated the department’s plans to seek a new indictment of Mr. Comey in the coming weeks.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling landed at a delicate moment for the Justice Department. Officials have been considering whether to bring a fresh round of charges against Mr. Comey after a different federal judge dismissed the original case he was facing, deciding that the loyalist prosecutor picked by Mr. Trump to file it was appointed to her job illegally.
In its broad strokes, the ruling highlighted a series of procedural missteps by the Justice Department as it investigated Mr. Comey during Mr. Trump’s first presidency and his current term in office. It suggested that sloppiness by the department had helped to sabotage the president’s public demands to use the criminal justice system to go after people like Mr. Comey, whom he has described as one of his chief enemies.
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Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s 46-page ruling was focused on a cache of emails and text messages between Mr. Comey and one of his close confidants, Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at Columbia University’s law school. Investigators first obtained the materials in 2019 and 2020 from several of Mr. Richman’s electronic devices, when they were conducting a different inquiry into whether Mr. Comey had leaked information to the news media through Mr. Richman about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Prosecutors used the same files in their more recent efforts to charge Mr. Comey with lying to and obstructing Congress in testimony he gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he denied leaking information concerning sensitive investigations conducted when he ran the F.B.I.
