Comey alleges that the Trump administration fired her for political reasons, including her family ties to former FBI director James Comey.
Published On 3 Dec 2025
The United States Justice Department is seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey to contest her firing.
In court papers filed on Monday, the Justice Department argued Comey did not properly follow administrative complaint procedures before suing.
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The petition to dismiss the suit came ahead of a Thursday hearing in the case before a Manhattan federal court.
In September, Comey sued the department, the Executive Office of the President, US Attorney General Pamela Bondi, the Office of Personnel Management and the United States.
The lawsuit said her July firing was based on political reasons, including that her 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 an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Inside the dismissal petition
The Justice Department petitioned for the dismissal of Maurene Comey’s case in a joint letter submitted to Judge Jesse M Furman.
Maurene Comey’s lawyers and the chief of the civil division of the federal prosecutor’s office in Albany both contributed to the letter.
The Justice Department argued that Maurene Comey’s complaint should be tossed because she did not fully comply with administrative procedures requiring the Merit Systems Protection Board to first consider her claim.
It also rejected her lawsuit’s assertion that the notice of appeal she filed with the board was futile.
The board, the Justice Department maintained, was “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 expertise to adjudicate this novel dispute” and was not an appropriate forum because “this case raises foundational constitutional questions with respect to the separation of powers”.
They also argued that it was “no longer true” that the board functions independently of the president.
Last month, US Attorney John Sarcone in Albany took the case after the recusal of prosecutors in New York, where Maurene Comey had secured guilty verdicts in several high-profile cases, including the sex trafficking conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell and the bribery convictions of former US Senator Bob Menendez and his wife.
Two weeks before Maurene Comey was fired, a jury convicted music maven Sean Combs of prostitution-related charges, though it acquitted him of more serious sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges. She led the prosecution team.
Combs, 56, is scheduled for release from prison in June 2028.
Maxwell, 63, was convicted in December 2021 on sex-trafficking charges after a jury found she aided the sex abuse of girls and women by financier Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was found dead in his federal jail cell in August 2019 as he awaited a sex trafficking charge. His death was ruled a suicide.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence at a prison camp in Texas, where she was transferred last summer from a prison in Florida.
Robert Menendez, 71, is imprisoned in Pennsylvania. He is scheduled for release in September 2034.
