US Justice Department seeks to dismiss Maurene Comey lawsuit on procedural grounds

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department is seeking dismissal of a lawsuit that fired former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey brought against it, saying she didn’t properly follow administrative complaint procedures before suing.

The argument was in court papers filed Monday prior to a Thursday hearing in 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 said her July firing was based on political reasons, including that her father is former FBI Director James Comey. President Donald Trump fired James Comey in 2017.

The Justice Department indicated its defense to the lawsuit in a joint letter submitted to Judge Jesse M. Furman by Maurene Comey’s lawyers and the chief of the civil division of the federal prosecutor’s office in Albany.

It said her lawsuit was not properly before the court because she did not fully comply with administrative procedures requiring the Merit Systems Protection Board to first consider her claim. It rejected her lawsuit’s claim 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.”

Maurene 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, U.S. 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 U.S. Sen. 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.