Trump Abruptly Fires Former FBI Director James Comey's Daughter, a Federal Prosecutor Who Worked on Epstein-Related Cases

Jul 17, 2025

Trump’s appointees have stoked expectations that they will release information about Jeffrey Epstein—a notorious abuser and procurer of underage girls—only to have Trump suddenly declare the issue closed to further investigation. Now he has arbitrarily fired a federal prosecutor on the Epstein case, probably due to her connection to her father, former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump has decided is a political enemy.

The New York Times reports:

Maurene Comey, a career federal prosecutor who worked on the Jeffrey Epstein case and was abruptly fired by the Trump administration this week, implored her colleagues Thursday not to give into fear, calling it “the tool of a tyrant.”
“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain,” she wrote in an email that was circulated to her colleagues within the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan. “Do not let that happen.”
Ms. Comey is the daughter of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director and an adversary of President Trump. …
Firings of line prosecutors used to be rare. In the Southern District, several office veterans could recall only two over the course of nearly four decades. And both prosecutors were terminated for misconduct by the head of the office—not officials in Washington—after investigations.
But since Mr. Trump took close control of the Justice Department in January, such firings have become more common. In March, the White House abruptly fired two prosecutors in Los Angeles and Memphis, and more recently, it fired more than 20 career employees, including the ethics adviser to the attorney general, Pam Bondi.

The independence of federal prosecutors from direct political interference is not mandated in the Constitution, but it has become a norm for a reason. It shields prosecutors from corrupting influences, particularly in a situation like the Epstein case, where there is a lot of potential for improper motives—either to over-sensationalize the case, or to suppress it.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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