By Morgan Sweeney
The Center Square

A trial date of Jan. 5 has been set for the case involving former FBI Director James Comey after he pleaded not guilty Wednesday to criminal charges brought by the Trump administration.

Comey was indicted by a grand jury on Sept. 25 on one count of lying to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding. If he is found guilty, the judge hearing the case said he could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The former Obama-appointed FBI director led the probe, beginning in July 2016, into whether President Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign colluded with Russian actors to influence the results of the 2016 election. Trump fired Comey in 2017 and has accused him of leaking classified information about their conversations to the media, stealing government property, mishandling the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and lying to Congress about the “leaks” and about the scope of FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign.

The indictment charges Comey with making a false statement to Congress during a 2020 Senate hearing when he claimed that he had not “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports.” It also charges him with trying to obstruct that same hearing by lying.

Comey pleaded not guilty to the charges Wednesday before a Biden-appointed judge in the U.S. Eastern District Court of Virginia. The U.S. attorney who filed the indictment is Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide and former defense attorney for Trump, who is now the interim U.S. attorney for the district. Halligan replaced Trump’s previous nominee, Eric Siebert, just days after Trump called for Siebert’s resignation, claiming it was because Virginia’s two Democratic senators supported his nomination.