Former prosecutor sues Trump DOJ over SDNY firing

MANHATTAN (CN) — Maurene Comey, the former assistant U.S. attorney who handled the feds’ Jeffrey Epstein case, sued the Donald Trump administration on Monday morning over her “politically motivated” July firing from the Southern District of New York prosecutors’ office.

Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey and herself a veteran federal prosecutor who worked on the cases against entertainment mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs and pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, says in her civil complaint that she was fired “solely or substantially because her father is former FBI Director James B. Comey, or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”

Represented by Manhattan-based attorney Ellen Blain and Connecticut counsel Margaret M. Donovan, Comey says in her complaint that “there is no legitimate explanation” for the firing.

Comey says she never received an explanation for her abrupt firing, in violation of statutory protections under the Civil Service Reform Act that governed how and why she could be terminated, including specific prohibitions against termination for discriminatory reasons such as political affiliation.

In her complaint, she says that when she asked then-interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, and Sean Buckley, deputy U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the reason for her termination, Clayton, a Trump appointee and occasional golf partner, told her: “All I can say is it came from Washington. I can’t tell you anything else.”

Comey, in her complaint, repeatedly points to social media posts by Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist and Trump ally who has urged the president to purge disloyal federal employees, including a May 2025 post in which Loomer called for James Comey’s “liberal daughter” and her “Democrat husband” to be “FIRED from the DOJ immediately” “for being a national security risk via their proximity to a criminal [i.e., Mr. Comey] who just committed a felony by threatening to assassinate the president.”

In a subsequent social media post, Loomer doubled down on goading Comey’s termination: “Don’t expect anything good to happen at the DOJ if Blondi [sic] can’t even bring herself to fire Comey’s rat daughter.”

After the firing was announced in July, Loomer gloated in another social post that Comey’s firing was the result of “my pressure campaign on Pam Blondi [sic] to fire Comey’s daughter and Comey’s son-in-law from the DOJ.”

Trump fired the elder Comey in May 2017, several months after his bureau began an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Trump still often deflects as the politically-motivated “Russia hoax.”

Maurene Comey’s lawsuit added in a footnote that, according to a website that compiles Trump’s posts on the social media platforms X and Truth Social, Trump has posted (or reposted) approximately 259 times about James Comey from Oct.16, 2016, to the present, including repeatedly calling him the “worst” FBI director in history.

Now eight months into his second term as president, Trump has been mostly unable to shake off public demand for the disclosure of unreleased files from federal investigations into Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring and any connections to wealthy and powerful individuals.

In addition to the Justice Department, Comey’s complaint names as co-defendants: the Executive Office of the President; Director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys Francey Hakes, in her official capacity; U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in her official capacity; the Executive Office for United States Attorneys; the Office of Personnel Management; and the United States of America.

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