Once again, President Donald Trump was caught in a scandal and a Comey got fired.
The strange and fateful entanglement between two powerful families jumped into a new generation this week when Maurene Comey got the sack from her job as one of New York’s top prosecutors.
And like her father, former FBI Director James Comey, who was ousted months into Trump’s first term, she left with a dramatic warning about encroaching autocracy.
“Fear is the tool of the tyrant,” Comey said in a message to colleagues, obtained by CNN on Thursday, after losing her job at the US attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, where she took part in prosecutions including that of Jeffrey Epstein – who has returned to national attention of late.
A controversy over unreleased Justice Department files over the late accused sex trafficker is estranging the president from some in his MAGA base, causing him to absurdly blame Democrats — and James Comey — for orchestrating some kind of “hoax”
Maurene Comey also prosecuted Sean “Diddy” Combs and high-profile murder, drug and gang violence cases. She said she was let go without explanation. But the only surprise really is that it took so long. A person familiar with the situation said that being a Comey is untenable in this administration because the former FBI chief continues to criticize the president. It works both ways, however, with Trump frequently lambasting his first FBI chief, whom he fired on questionable grounds.
James Comey is no stranger to toxic politics
This new front in the Trump/Comey feud is the latest dramatic twist in the politically charged story of the former FBI director, whose choices even before Trump stormed onto the scene meant he was sucked into toxic politics in a way that is unusual for a modern incumbent of his former job.
After Trump took office in January 2017, Comey quickly became an early symbol of the president’s attempts to bend the US government’s legal agencies and instruments to his will.
He is also one of the most prominent avatars for the conspiracies advanced by Trump and his MAGA crowd — which have escaped the president’s capacity to control in the Epstein saga — that there is a pernicious “deep state” inside the US government plotting to bring down the president and his supporters.
Comey said that he was summoned to the White House for an uncomfortable one-on-one dinner with Trump a week into his first term and asked to pledge loyalty to the president, in a breach of the protocol by which FBI directors have sought distance from the Oval Office following the long and Machiavellian rule at the bureau of J. Edgar Hoover. Comey later testified to Congress he told Trump he would be honest but not politically loyal in that encounter, which started the slide to his dismissal in May 2017.
In retrospect, and especially in light of the events of Trump’s second term, that meeting was one of the first signs of Trump’s intention to weaponize the Justice Department and the FBI. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who is also embroiled in the Epstein storm, and FBI Director Kash Patel are Trump ultra-loyalists and won their jobs by becoming stars in MAGA world.
And ironically, the cudgel of politicized justice that Comey refused to provide for Trump seems now to be turned against him. The FBI is investigating its former director and ex-CIA Director John Brennan for possible false statements to Congress relating to the issue that first dragged Comey into the president’s bad books — the intelligence community assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election to try to help Trump win, CNN reported last week.
Comey was also one of the first major public figures to sound the alarm about Trump’s autocratic tendencies and a style of leadership that often appears to prioritize his own political and personal goals above a broad definition of the national interest.
In a dramatic congressional hearing days after he was fired, Comey talked about contemporaneous memos he wrote after meeting Trump. He said he believed that the president was trying to get “something in exchange” for allowing him to stay in his job.
Later, in his searing book “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey wrote that dealing with Trump reminded him of his days prosecuting mafia kingpins, with their “silent circle of assent.”
Trump’s implication in an interview with NBC after firing Comey that his decision was partly to do with the Russia investigation only heightened concerns about the president’s motives.
The circumstances of Comey’s dismissal were one of the factors that led to the appointment of another former FBI director, Robert Mueller, to head the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Ultimately, Mueller did not establish that members of the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia’s election interference effort, but did say the president’s team expected to benefit from it. Trump refers to the entire issue of Russian election interference as a hoax.
Comey’s showdown with Trump started even before he was president
Comey’s tortured relationship with Trump began when he was among senior intelligence officials who went to Trump Tower to meet the incoming commander in chief two weeks before he was sworn in for the first time. Comey pulled Trump aside and told him about a dossier of allegations against him that also detailed interactions between his aides and Russians.
The dossier later became the centerpiece of Trump’s allegations that the intelligence agencies plotted against him. It reinforced the view of many supporters that there is a shady secret government that runs the United States — a conspiracy theory that helps explain the resonance of the story around Epstein, who MAGA activists claim was murdered in prison and kept a list of famous clients.
Comey’s dealings with Trump were not the first time he was pulled into the country’s treacherous politics. In a move that Democrats claim cost their nominee the White House in 2016, he sensationally sent a letter to Congress announcing he was reopening the Hillary Clinton State Department email probe only 11 days before the election. He has since described the episode as a nightmare, but at the time he maintained he’d had no choice to tell the public about new evidence, because if he didn’t do so he’d have been accused of covering it up and potentially helping Clinton win.
This episode reinforced claims by critics on both sides of the aisle that Comey is sometimes a grandstander and has a rather too finely developed sense of his own integrity that leads him into tricky political situations.
Americans first saw the moral certainty Comey brought to his professional life during the George W. Bush administration. As deputy attorney general, he rushed to a Washington hospital to thwart an attempt by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card to get a seriously ill Attorney General John Ashcroft to reauthorize a surveillance program.
The sense that Comey sees himself as a guardian of some of America’s most fundamental democratic values has surrounded his public moves ever since. And the message his daughter released after her dismissal suggests the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain,” she wrote to her colleagues. “Do not let that happen.”
Maurene Comey’s dismissal occurred two months after the previous bizarre development in the Comey-Trump melodrama. Her father was interview by Secret Service Agents over a photograph he posted to social media showing shells on a beach spelling out “86 47” — a code for removing Trump from the presidency. Some senior Trump officials accused Comey of calling for the president’s assassination. Comey said he had no idea that some people associated the code with violence.
But the feud between Trump and Comey is as bitter as ever, and there are surely new chapters to come — which might not be out of place in the legal thrillers the former FBI chief has taken to writing in his retirement.
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