Maurene Comey, the Manhattan federal prosecutor who was fired from the US attorney’s office this week, has prosecuted a number of high-profile cases and followed in her father James Comey’s footsteps with her work at the Southern District of New York.
Prior to Maurene Comey’s recent dismissal, she was a prosecutor in the case against accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and more recently against Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Those high-profile cases are among many that she has prosecuted in New York, which also include cases involving murders, drug trafficking and gang violence, according to the Department of Justice’s website.
Comey spent nearly a decade working as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York. She was previously a law clerk to Chief Judge Loretta A. Preska in the same federal district and an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2013 and was involved with the Harvard Law Review during her time there. Prior to law school, she earned a bachelor’s degree in history and music from the College of William & Mary in 2010.
Comey told her former colleagues in an email that “fear is the tool of a tyrant” and her sudden firing should “fuel the fire” of their work fighting abuses of power.
“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain,” she wrote in the message, which was obtained by CNN. “Do not let that happen.”
The reason for her firing was not immediately clear, but a person familiar with the situation said being a Comey is untenable in this administration given her father James Comey is “constantly going after the administration.”
James Comey, the former FBI chief, previously served as Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division for the Southern District of New York from 1987 to 1993, according to the DOJ’s website and as a US Attorney for SDNY from 2002– to 2003.
A Donald Trump critic, James Comey is also currently under investigation for possible false statements to Congress, following a referral from the current CIA Director John Ratcliffe. He was separately questioned in May by the US Secret Service after he posted a photo on social media showing seashells on a beach that spelled out “86 47,” which he has denied was a call for violence against the US president.
The referral came after Ratcliffe released a review that criticized the 2016 US intelligence community assessment, long criticized by Trump and his allies, that found Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to intervene in the election on Trump’s behalf.
In a post on X, Ratcliffe said the new review found that the original assessment “was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environments of former Dir. Brennan & former FBI Dir. Comey.”
Maurene Comey’s firing this week also comes as Trump faces growing pressure to release more information on Epstein, the disgraced financier. The Justice Department last week released a memo that there was no Epstein “client list,” and the Trump administration announced that it didn’t plan to release any more documents in the investigation.
Trump said in a post on social media Wednesday the controversy around Epstein is “bullsh*t” and said that his supporters who care about it are “weaklings.” The president also attacked the credibility of the federal investigation into Epstein this week, claiming that the files “were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by Biden (administration).”
CNN’s Kara Scannell, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Evan Perez and Katie Bo Lillis contributed to this report.
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