Pam Bondi Fires Jeffrey Epstein Prosecutor

Photo by Annabelle Gordon/Sipa USA/Sipa via AP Images

Attorney General Pam Bondi fired Maurene Comey, a prosecutor with the Southern District of New York who had prosecuted deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Politico reported on Wednesday.

Comey, a senior trial counsel, is the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in 2017.

“The reason for her firing was not immediately clear. She did not immediately respond to phone calls and an email seeking comment,” Politico said. “Comey, who had worked in the U.S. attorney’s office for nearly a decade, prosecuted both Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Maurene Comey worked at the SDNY for almost a decade.

The firing comes a week and a half after Bondi sparked an uproar among Trump supporters who long held out hope that the president would reveal damning details about powerful Epstein associates engaged in criminal activity. Bondi’s Department of Justice concluded in a memo that Epstein did not actually have the long-rumored client list he was believed to have had. That finding was a 180 from Bondi’s comments in February, when she said the list was “sitting on my desk right now.”

The DOJ also reiterated its position that Epstein committed suicide in a jail cell in 2019.

Maurene Comey’s termination at the DOJ comes amid an investigation into her father, who posted an image of seashells on a beach arranged to say  “86 47.” Though “86” is restaurant industry lingo for refusing service to a patron or kicking them out of an establishment, many conservatives insisted Comey was calling for the president’s death. Last week, The New York Times reported that the Secret Service had tracked the former FBI director after the incident.

James Comey denies he meant anything nefarious by his post.

Trump has brushed aside calls to reveal more information about the Epstein case and has shown increasing frustration when asked about it over the past week.

“But I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” the president told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s pretty boring stuff. It’s sordid, but it’s boring. And I don’t understand why it keeps going. I think, really, only pretty bad people, including fake news, wanna keep something like that going.”