The Government Kept the Copies. A Judge Just Told It to Give Them Back.

The current procedural posture of Richman v. United States (D.D.C.) has not changed as of 8/11/2026. The most recent filings in the case are under seal.

When the government executes a warrant on your computer, it doesn’t just copy the files it’s looking for. It clones the whole drive — a forensic image of everything — and it often keeps that image long after the case that justified it is over.

For years, courts have mostly shrugged at this. The most famous attempt to grapple with it, a Second Circuit case called United States v. Ganias, teed up the exact question — can the government hold onto years’ worth of your data that fell outside the warrant? — and then the full court declined to answer it, resolving the case on a technicality instead. The question was left hanging.

Late in 2025, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. picked it back up. In litigation involving Daniel Richman — a law professor and associate of former FBI Director James Comey — Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the government to return the digital copies it had made of the contents of Richman’s computers. Not to stop using them going forward. To hand the copies to the custody of the court.

That’s a bigger deal than it sounds. The unspoken assumption baked into some modern forensic practice is that once the government has lawfully imaged your device, the image is theirs — a permanent asset, available to be re-opened and re-searched whenever a new question comes up. An order to return the copies challenges that assumption at the root. It treats the clone not as government property but as something the government was only ever allowed to borrow.

This is the whole ballgame for one of the sections I’ll be drafting this year — the one on copying and retention. The core question is embarrassingly simple and almost entirely unanswered by statute: when the case is over, does the government have to give the copies back or delete them? Right now the honest answer is “maybe, maybe not, make a judge tell me to delete it.” Richman is a judge telling the government to delete it.

FBI policy requires return of the original hard drive and destruction of copies, with the exception of FISA collections subject to its retention requirements. But that portion of policy generally applies when the case is ready to be closed. In theory, if the case is not closed, the property might be held indefinitely.

I’ll do the full breakdown when the Thursday series gets going. For now, file this one away as Exhibit A for why retention is where the real fight is — and why “the government kept the copies” should never be the end of the story.