US Justice Department seeks to dismiss lawsuit over Maurene Comey’s firing

Former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey filed a lawsuit to contest her dismissal, but the US Justice Department wants it dismissed.

The Justice Department argued in court documents that Comey did not properly follow the administrative complaint process before filing a lawsuit.

A Thursday hearing in the case before a Manhattan federal court was the subject of the lawsuit’s petition to dismiss it.

Comey filed a lawsuit against the United States, the Office of Personnel Management, the US, the US, and the Executive Office of the President in September.

According to the lawsuit, her July firing was justified by political factors, including the fact that her father was James Comey, a former FBI director, and a well-known critic of US President Donald Trump.

In 2017 amid disagreements over a Russian election interference investigation, Trump fired James Comey.

Inside the petition for dismissal

In a joint letter submitted to Judge Jesse M. Furman, the Justice Department asked for the dismissal of Maurene Comey’s case.

The letter was made possible by Maurene Comey’s attorneys and the federal prosecutor’s office’s civil division chief in Albany.

The Justice Department argued that Maurene Comey should not have been subject to the Merit Systems Protection Board’s initial review of her claim because she had not fully adhered to the administrative procedures.

Additionally, it rejected her lawsuit’s claim that her board’s notice of appeal was futile.

According to the Justice Department, the board was “the appropriate forum to decide whether Ms. Comey’s removal was a prohibited personnel action or an arbitrary and capricious agency action,” the Justice Department claimed.

The board “lacks expertise to resolve this novel dispute,” according to Comey’s attorneys, and was not a good place to hold meetings because “this case raises fundamental constitutional questions with respect to the separation of powers.”

Additionally, they claimed that the board’s independence from the president was “no longer true.”

Following the recusal of prosecutors in New York, where Maurene Comey had secured guilty verdicts in numerous well-known cases, including the convictions of former US Senator Bob Menendez and his wife for bribery, US Attorney John Sarcone in Albany took the case last month.

Sean Combs, a music mogul, was found guilty of prostitution-related charges by a jury two weeks before Maurene Comey’s firing, but his conviction was voided for more serious sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy counts. The prosecution team was led by her.

Combs, 56, is scheduled to be released from prison in June 2028.

After a jury found her guilty by financier Jeffrey Epstein of assisting the sex abuse of girls and women, Maxwell, 63, was found guilty in December 2021 of sex-trafficking charges. Epstein was detained in his federal jail cell as he waited a sex trafficking charge in August 2019. His death was declared a suicide.

Maxwell was transferred from a Florida prison last summer while serving a 20-year prison sentence in a Texas prison.