Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey and a federal prosecutor who oversaw some of the most high-profile criminal cases in America, was fired late Wednesday.
Sources confirmed to ABC News that Comey had been let go from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
The firing will likely be controversial in political circles, given the acrimonious history between her father and President Donald Trump.
However, Maurene Comey’s firing came after her most recent high-profile case — a wide-ranging federal conspiracy and sex trafficking case against hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs — ended in a pyrrhic victory, with the jury finding the rapper guilty only on lower-level charges.
Comey also oversaw the cases against sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in custody in 2019, and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently behind bars.
ABC reported that President Trump had groused about a Comey having a top role in the Department of Justice.
However, Comey had been kept on after her father’s firing in 2017 and continued to be a prosecutor in some of the highest-profile criminal cases the DOJ brought, both under the first Trump administration and the Biden administration.
In addition to Epstein and Maxwell, Comey helped prosecute Columbia University gynecologist Robert Hadden, who was accused of sexually abusing numerous young women, and Natalie Edwards, a former Department of Treasury official who leaked thousands of “suspicious activity reports” and tried to claim whistleblower status.
Hadden was found guilty at trial, and Edwards pleaded guilty.
Was Maurene Comey’s firing long overdue?
Furthermore, as Business Insider noted in a 2021 profile of the attorney, the younger Comey was unlike her father, in that she “has largely stayed out of the spotlight, instead maintaining a low-profile presence.”
However, it was impossible to maintain that low profile during the Diddy case, which ended with the jury largely rejecting the government’s assertion that Combs had been, as NBC News put it, “the key figure in sprawling racketeering and sex trafficking scheme.”
“This trial was a major gamble, and Combs won that bet,” Anna Cominsky, an associate professor of law and the director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at New York Law School, told NBC News.
“Everything is stacked against the defendant going into a federal case, in particular one like this.”
Combs’ attorneys, analysts said, effectively argued that while their client’s private life was unorthodox and often sordid — and involved certain illegal activities — the government’s impression that Combs was some kind of hip-hop Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t supported by the evidence.
“His attorneys were smart, and they owned the bad facts,” Cominsky said.
“They fought on the things that mattered, and it paid off.”
In this case, the jury only convicted him on two interstate prostitution counts, far less serious charges that don’t carry anywhere near the potential life sentence the government was seeking.
“Juries expect more from prosecutors than they do from defense attorneys,” said Jeffrey Harris, a former prosecutor with the Southern District of New York, “and when prosecutors lose credibility by over-charging it usually does not end well.”
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