What’s the story? On the firing of Comey’s daughter
Day after day after day, the news keeps coming – and as a blogger, I have to decide what to cover.
Sometimes it’s obvious; a huge story that takes up space for days and weeks and even months. But more often there are many smaller stories. It’s easiest when one or two of them especially grab my interest and/or I have something unique to say. Sometimes I deal with it by having a roundup of smaller stories. And of course I often write about topics that aren’t in the news at all. But often, I have to choose.
Today there are a bunch of stories that seem of equal and relatively tepid interest. And so I’ll choose one – the firing of James Comey’s daughter Maurene Comey from her post as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Apparently she’d been in that position for a decade – who knew? Not I; did you? What does it mean that she held the position, and why was she fired?
We don’t necessarily know, but we do know this:
Comey has worked on a number of high-profile cases for the Department of Justice, including the prosecutions of Sean “Diddy” Combs, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell. …
Although the reason for her abrupt dismissal remains unclear, according to Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein, she was reportedly “the Justice Dept lawyer who filed the key court declarations to keep the Epstein files from release under #FOIA.”
That’s certainly of interest. It was Bondi who did the official firing, by the way.
From the relevant Politico article:
Last year, U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe, a George W. Bush appointee, upheld the FBI’s denial of access to the bulk of the records. The judge’s ruling rested largely on a formal declaration from a federal prosecutor deeply involved in the Epstein and Maxwell prosecutions: Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey. She argued that disclosure of the investigative records was likely to interfere with the appeal in Maxwell’s case.
So there you have it. Make of it what you will. This is not one of the instances where I have some unique perspective to add.
Hasn’t Dershowitz consistently said that records are closed by judicial order?
Yawn.
A meritless story, all because of her last name.
Well, I hope she wasn’t fired just because of her parentage.
I think Chris Cuomo probably has more inside information about the Epstein debacle than the average man on the street.
Fast forward to 15:20 where he claims there is no client list, but there is a coverup. According to him two New York judges are responsible for sealing much of the information.
He wonders why the Trump administration hasn’t just made the case for this. Well, the firing of Maurene Comey might be the first step in getting to the release of credible documents. Was she an impediment/blocking the DOJ/Bondi working to get the documents released/unredacted/unsealed? I’ve read in the past the SDNY has acted like they’re a separate agency and not directly under the control of Washington.
Here’s what Grok had to say about that:
It even has a nickname “Sovereign District”.
Like many, Cuomo does wonder whether people caught up in the controversy that might be tarred by the release of their name without the proper context that they had no involvement in the abuse/rape of underage girls. And part of his hesitancy to keeping the names out of the public is that some of these people might also not have been investigated but possibly were involved.
This is certainly a mess. Dershowitz says release all the files and let those innocent show their innocence/non-involvement like he had to, but that could be very expensive and the results might leave them with a stain that follows them.
Is it better that 10 men go free than one innocent man be punished? Isn’t that part of the legal standard of our system?
I have 10x more confidence in the integrity of the Trump administration, than the Democrat/Biden administration that used the government to falsely go after their opponents.
Bondi got caught in political machinations. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is they get away with it, and Republicans are less likely to cast a blind eye.
The TRUTH About Epstein’s “Client List”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_5FREPhzfQ
@Brian E:Is it better that 10 men go free than one innocent man be punished? Isn’t that part of the legal standard of our system?
It’s in Blackstone,
but I’m not sure of what his source was, because earlier formulations used a different number. Hale said five, Fortescue said twenty, Maimonides said a thousand (which I must say sounds very like Maimonides).
Alexander Volokh wrote on this in 1997.
Provided it merely expresses a presumption of innocence it’s harmless enough, but in terms of society I don’t think letting ten criminals escape is better than occasionally punishing someone innocent, at least for some crimes. Consider how many people ten career criminals may kill, or otherwise harm, considering that some ridiculously large fraction of violent crime is committed by some ridiculously small fraction of criminals.
In the US we’ve been much closer to the Maimonides standard if you ask me, and you can see that with the illegals it’s like pulling teeth to deport no matter what they’ve done.
Some commentary from Not the Bee.
https://notthebee.com/article/doj-fires-diddy-and-ghislaine-maxwell-prosecutor-oh-shes-james-comeys-daughter-too
They start with a question that looks significant:
“Why was the daughter of the former FBI director who is under federal investigation for conspiracy against the president in charge of prosecuting two major trafficking cases?”
Some commonly know information follows.
Their conclusion:
“At any rate, Maurene was certainly radioactive … especially considering that Trump says her dad helped Obama create the Epstein Files.”
Why was the daughter of Comey a US attorney anyway? No ethics at all among the elite.
@Chases Eagles:Why was the daughter of Comey a US attorney anyway?
Because it’s a big club, and we ain’t in it.
I had heard it expressed that the Diddy case was over-charged and unlikely to be successful, but that was after the fact. I have also read that a prosecutor doesn’t bring a case until they are quite sure they will win.
DC seems to be a town where family and marriage connections have obvious conflict of interest problems, where it becomes hard to imagine that people aren’t talking about things that should be off-limits outside of the office – especially when so much gets leaked strategically, so I don’t see it as being unusual that she was let go, now that the Diddy trial is over.
If I were cynical about the community of powerful insiders at the DOJ, and a conspiracy theorist, I might think that she was given the Epstein, Maxwell, and Diddy cases as a damage control mission, to control the flow of outbound information and keep sensitive things wrapped that needed to stay wrapped. Is it remarkable that she was assigned these cases that drew so much public attention? Maybe one way to ensure there’s no chance that it might happen again, is to fire her. That’s fairly normal procedure for new administrations anyway, isn’t it? Is it really controversial? (I’m not a conspiracy theorist, by the way)
Back of the book section
https://x.com/ProfMJCleveland/status/1945966840741605554
Well, I hope she wasn’t fired just because of her parentage.
Kate:
You’re a better person than I am. 🙂
This kind of thing though, is one reason why academics push DEI. They think “meritocracy” is fake, and who’s related to who in Washington DC and Wall Street and what schools they went to are pretty good evidence that the upper echelons of society have a fake meritocracy, where the occasional J. D. Vance can get in–albeit connected to Peter Thiel and Amy Chua–to legitimize the careers of the Maurene Comeys.
In the rest of society meritocracy is not really fake, but it is limited. People can compete for things on merit, but for what’s left over after things got by “who you know” are allocated.
Just enough of us advance that way that nobody gets strung up on lampposts… but almost all of us are, or know personally, someone passed over for someone else less qualified.
This kind of thing though, is one reason why academics push DEI. They think “meritocracy” is fake, and who’s related to who in Washington DC and Wall Street and what schools they went to are pretty good evidence that the upper echelons of society have a fake meritocracy, where the occasional J. D. Vance can get in–albeit connected to Peter Thiel and Amy Chua–to legitimize the careers of the Maurene Comeys.
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I doubt it has much effect at all. Higher education is run by people who have been employed in higher education throughout their work life. The fraud they know about occurs in their own institutions.
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You have an economy which has > 17 million professional-managerial positions. There are fewer than 1,500 law positions in U.S. Attorneys’ offices. JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs employ roughly one million people in sum, but the share who hold salaried positions in casino banking operations is a small minority of their collective workforce.