Who is Maurene Comey, the federal prosecutor abruptly fired by the DoJ?

For Maurene Comey, abruptly fired as a US federal prosecutor without explanation, it may feel like a case of like father, like daughter.

Comey was terminated suddenly this week via a letter from a justice department official citing the president’s powers under article two of the US constitution.

Conventional wisdom suggests that Comey’s firing was prompted primarily by Donald Trump’s continuing animus towards her father, James Comey, who was sacked as FBI director during the president’s first term in 2017 and has been in his crosshairs ever since.

“I think that anyone with the last name of Comey becomes a target of this administration,” Dave Aronberg, a former Palm Beach state attorney, told Newsweek after the firing of the younger Comey.

ABC News reported that Trump had privately vented about having a Comey working in his administration.

Beyond the familial ties, however, the wider political contexts surrounding the two dismissals have uncanny similarities. Both Comeys have come as Trump is feeling the heat from simmering scandals with the potential to taint him personally.

James Comey’s removal from the FBI in 2017 came at a time when the president was increasingly agitated by the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the previous year’s presidential election on his behalf.

This time, it is his daughter’s past involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein prosecution that forms the broader backdrop. Trump is under pressure from his own Maga base as never before over the justice department’s recent decision to withhold publication of official files on the affair, after the attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced that a previously much-touted list of influential clients of Epstein did not, in fact, exist.

As a chief prosecutor of the violent and organized crime unit in the US attorney’s office in the southern district of New York, Maurene Comey led the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and accomplice, who was jailed for 20 years in 2021 for her role in helping her partner exploit teenage girls.

While there is no clear indication that Maurene Comey’s removal was connected to her work in the case, the possibility arises, as highlighted by the New York Times, that she may have been picked as a scapegoat.

Her firing came days after Trump – infuriated by his supporters’ continued clamor for files on Epstein to be released – accused her father of having fabricated them with the help of Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Yet the timing may have been a convenient coincidence.

Laura Loomer, the pro-Trump media influencer who has been among the most insistent voices calling for files to be released, celebrated Comey’s defenestration in social media posts.

“This comes 2 months after my pressure campaign on Pam Blondi [Loomer’s derogatory nickname for Bondi] to fire Comey’s daughter and Comey’s son-in-law from the DOJ,” she wrote on X.

Loomer – who has successfully pressed Trump to fire several officials based on their marriage partnerships or family ties – originally called for Bondi to terminate Comey and her husband, Lucas Issacharoff, as assistant US attorney in the justice department’s civil rights division, in May.

Her demand was based on their relationship to James Comey, who had recently been questioned after posting on Instagram a picture of a shell arrangement showing the figures “8647”, which Trump’s supporters claimed was a coded call for the president’s assassination.

Maurene Comey’s response to the latest developments have, by all accounts, been stoic.

On Thursday, having told colleagues of her firing in an impromptu meeting earlier in the week, she emailed them to imploring them not to fall prey to fear, according to the New York Times, calling it “the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought”.

“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain,” she wrote. “Do not let that happen.”

Comey, 36, one of six siblings, may be inured to the spotlight, thanks to her experience in prosecuting other high profile cases apart from Epstein. She led the recent prosecution of Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was this month acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges but remains behind bars after being convicted of lesser offenses.

She was involved in the prosecution of Robert Haddon, a gynecologist who was given a 20-year jail sentence in 2023 after being convicted of multiple sexual assaults committed in the guise of medical examinations.

Comey rose up the career ladder after graduating from Harvard law school in 2013. She joined the New York southern district attorney’s office as a prosecutor in 2015 after having spent a year working as a legal clerk for Loretta Preska, who was at the time the district court’s chief judge.

Last year, she publicly opposed a freedom of information act application by an entertainment gossip site, Radar Online, for the release of FBI documents connected to the Epstein prosecution, arguing that they could jeopardize any retrial brought about by Maxwell’s appeal.

Some witnesses “may decline to cooperate in trial preparation with the Government and may refuse to testify at a retrial”, she wrote. “This outcome is likely because many witnesses only agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation because they understood that the government would take every effort to protect their privacy.”