FBI director defending government against claims it lied in San Bernardino iPhone case

FBI Director James Comey is fighting back against claims the govement lied about its inability to unlock the work-issued iPhone 5C used by the gunman in the San Beardino terrorist attack without Apple’s help.

In its filing in U.S. District Court in Riverside, the govement indicated the only method of hacking into the iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook was with Apple’s assistance.

“We tried everything that we could think of, asked everybody we thought might be able to help — inside and outside of the govement — before bringing the litigation in San Beardino,” Comey said Thursday in a news conference on C-SPAN.

• READ MORE: Apple vs. FBI continued coverage

But the case has gaered inteational attention and has “stimulated a marketplace of creative people from all over the world,” Comey said, who have contacted the govement.

“Lots of folks have come to us with potential ideas; it looks like we now have one that may work out. We’re optimistic, and we’ll see,” he said.

Nearly 24 hours before the govement was set to face Apple in court, the FBI aounced Monday it may have found a way to access the information. It asked the court for more time to test the method to be sure.

“We leaed about it this past weekend. We tried it on Sunday, and it looked like it might work so we worked to alert the court immediately,” he explained, declining to say if the govement has collaborated with the outside party in the past.

Comey discredited a method — highly speculated by a cryptologist — that the govement would use technology to replace the phone’s memory chip to make an unlimited amount of attempts on the passcode to unlock the phone.

“That doesn’t work,” Comey said.

Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym stayed her Feb. 16 order compelling Apple to develop software for the FBI that would allow investigators to hack into Farook’s iPhone. It was that order that prompted the unprecedented legal battle pitting individual privacy rights over the interests of law enforcement and national security, which quickly caught the national and global spotlight.

The Justice Department will file a report with the court by April 5 on the status of its efforts to access the phone’s data.

“Even if this particular technique makes it go away — that litigation, we still have to as a country resolve this conflict between these values we care about,” Comey said.

Earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company would take the fight to the Supreme Court if necessary.

Apple also moved to ask a judge to delay govement demands for data from a locked iPhone in a Brooklyn drug case while the FBI sees if it can get contents from a San Beardino attacker’s phone without Apple’s help.

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Apple attoey Marc Zwillinger asked U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie in Brooklyn late Thursday to postpone deadlines until the Department of Justice reports the FBI’s findings to a Califoia judge.

Zwillinger said the Brooklyn case will be affected by the outcome in Califoia regardless of what the Justice Department concludes regarding its methods of obtaining data without Apple’s help.

He said if the same approach can be used to unlock the iPhone in the Brooklyn case, Apple’s assistance will no longer be needed. He added that Apple will seek to test any claims by the govement that the method caot work on the iPhone in Brooklyn or claims that other methods caot be used.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.