The proceedings at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday morning will have the superficial trappings of any other arraignment: The accused will stand before a judge, hear the charges against him and sign the paperwork.
But the initial court appearance of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on charges of lying to Congress five years ago will be a highly unusual event with potentially enormous political and legal implications.
The indictment of Mr. Comey, who ordered the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, represented the most significant legal action taken against those President Trump has publicly targeted for retribution.
The case was presented to a grand jury on Sept. 25 — over the opposition of prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia — by Lindsey Halligan, a White House official hastily installed by Mr. Trump as U.S. attorney after her predecessor found insufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey.
It came shortly after the president all but commanded Attorney General Pam Bondi to take legal action against Mr. Comey; Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat; and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
“Nothing is being done,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.”
Mr. Comey faces up to five years in prison if convicted, though many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove — if his lawyers do not succeed in getting the charges quickly dismissed.
“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way,” Mr. Comey said in a video released hours after he was charged.
“We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either,” added Mr. Comey, who has assembled a formidable defense team, including Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the former U.S. attorney in Chicago known for prosecuting major terrorism and corruption cases.
The arraignment was originally scheduled for Thursday, but the chief judge of the district court moved it up a day, citing logistical and security concerns.
The visuals of vengeance are of great importance to Mr. Trump, who rose to national prominence as a reality television star who often watched his broadcasts with the sound off to better judge how he looked.
An agent in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office was suspended after he refused to organize an escort of uniformed law enforcement officials to walk Mr. Comey into the courthouse before the media, according to people with knowledge of the move who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
It remains unclear how that would have worked. Thus far, Mr. Comey has only been issued a summons to appear in court, although arrests are not unheard-of in such cases.
In 2022, Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump adviser, was taken into custody and handcuffed as he boarded an airplane in Washington, an action criticized as overly aggressive by the judge in his case.
Ms. Halligan, who narrowly secured a two-count indictment after a shaky solo appearance before the grand jury, has had a hard time getting anyone in her new office to help her with the case, according to current and former prosecutors in the office.
Two prosecutors who work in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Tyler Lemons and Gabriel Diaz, gave official notice on Tuesday that they had been assigned to the case, according to court records.
The case has cast a corrosive pall over the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the most important federal prosecutor’s offices in the nation.
Erik S. Siebert, the district’s former U.S. attorney, came under pressure from Mr. Trump after telling his superiors in the Justice Department that there was not enough evidence against Mr. Comey or, in a separate potential case, Ms. James. Mr. Siebert quit on Sept. 19, hours after the president called for his ouster.
Since then, Trump Justice Department appointees have fired without cause two top career prosecutors who also objected to the Comey indictment. Many other officials in the Eastern District of Virginia have applied for jobs on the outside or have written memos justifying their actions in case they have to contest personnel actions or sue the department.
The bare-bones, two-page indictment against Mr. Comey was signed only by Ms. Halligan, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who had been serving as a midlevel lawyer in the office of the White House staff secretary.
Mr. Comey was indicted on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.
Court records indicate that Ms. Halligan also tried to get the grand jury to indict Mr. Comey on a second false statement charge, which was rejected.
Mr. Comey is not the first former head of the F.B.I. to face criminal charges. In 1978, a former acting head of the bureau during Watergate, L. Patrick Gray, was indicted on charges of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans.
Prosecutors said he authorized agents to break into homes without warrants, in a hunt for fugitive members of Weather Underground, the violent far-left group.
The charges against Mr. Gray were dropped two years later.