Comey alleges that the Trump administration fired him for political reasons, including his family ties to former FBI Director James Comey.
The United States Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a lawsuit brought by former federal prosecutor Maureen Comey to protest his firing.
In court papers filed Monday, the Justice Department argued that Comey did not properly follow administrative complaint procedures before suing.
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The motion to dismiss the lawsuit came ahead of Thursday’s hearing in the case before a Manhattan federal court.
In September, Comey sued the department, the Executive Office of the President, U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, the Office of Personnel Management, and the United States.
The lawsuit says his dismissal in July was based on political reasons, including that his father is James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a prominent critic of President Donald Trump.
Trump fired James Comey in 2017, amid disagreements over the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
inside the dismissal petition
The Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss Maureen Comey’s case in a joint letter submitted to Judge Jesse M. Furman.
Maureen Comey’s attorney and the head of the civil division of the federal prosecutor’s office in Albany both contributed to the letter.
The Justice Department argued that Maureen Comey’s complaint should be dismissed because she did not fully follow the administrative procedures required for the Merit System Protection Board to first consider her claim.
It also rejected her lawsuit’s claim that the notice of appeal she filed before the board was meaningless.
The Justice Department says the board is “the appropriate forum to determine whether, as Ms. Comey claims, her removal was a prohibited personnel action or an arbitrary and capricious agency action”.
Comey’s lawyers said in the filing that the board “lacks the expertise to adjudicate this new controversy” and is not an appropriate forum because “this case raises fundamental constitutional questions regarding the separation of powers”.
He also argued that it is “no longer true” that the board acts independently of the president.
Last month, U.S. Attorney John Sarcone in Albany took up the case after prosecutors withdrew in New York, where Maureen Comey had secured guilty verdicts in several high-profile cases, including the sex trafficking conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell and the bribery conviction of former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez and his wife.
Two weeks before Maureen Comey was fired, a jury convicted music expert Sean Combs of prostitution-related charges, although it acquitted him of more serious sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges. He led the prosecution team.
Combs, 56, is scheduled to be released from prison in June 2028.
Maxwell, 63, was convicted of sex-trafficking charges in December 2021 after a jury found she facilitated the sexual exploitation of girls and women by financier Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was found dead in his federal prison cell in August 2019 as he awaited sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence in a prison camp in Texas, where she was transferred from a prison in Florida last summer.
Robert Menendez, 71, is being held in Pennsylvania. It is scheduled to be released in September 2034.
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