A New York Times report reveals that US attorney’s offices in the New York area have been thrown into chaos amid a string of departures and firings since President Trump took office in January. One of the more headline-grabbing departures occurred on Wednesday, when US attorney Maurene Comey – daughter of former FBI Director and noted Trump opponent James Comey – was dismissed by higher-ups in Washington. Maurene Comey had been in charge of the prosecutions against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Her firing came with little explanation, and was a surprise to acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), Jay Clayton, who was notified after the fact and not afforded an opportunity to weigh in on the matter.
While summary firings of US attorneys are unusual, Comey’s ouster fits with the broader trend of the still-short track record of Trump’s second term. In February, interim US attorney for SDNY Danielle Sassoon resigned in protest after the decision from higher-ups in Washington to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In her resignation letter, Sassoon claimed to have witnessed Mayor Adams and his attorneys proposing a quid-pro-quo during a meeting with federal prosecutors over his case, saying that they offered to comply with Trump’s mass deportation policy in exchange for the dropped charges.
Sassoon’s resignation was followed by half a dozen more from other attorneys and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in New York and Washington who refused to file the order to drop the charges. In a scathing letter of resignation made public, one of the assistant US attorneys, Hagan Scott, wrote to his superiors: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
The US attorneys in Newark, Brooklyn, Albany, and Manhattan, the Times notes, are all interim appointments that have not gone through Senate confirmation, leaving them to work on 120-day terms before being replaced (or confirmed by the Senate). The need to replace the rolling vacancies has led to some controversial appointments, like Joseph Nocella Jr., acting US attorney for the Eastern District out of Brooklyn since May 5th, whose lack of experience reportedly led Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to privately object to his nomination.
Others are even more glaringly lacking in experience and have deeper connections to the president himself – like Alina Habba, currently the interim US attorney for Newark, and formerly Trump’s personal lawyer. Habba had no prior prosecutorial experience before taking on the position, and was admonished by a federal Judge André M. Espinosa for her office’s charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for trespassing at an ICE detention center: “Your role is not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas.”
The latest disruption caused by firings, resignations, and interim assignments is a more intense iteration of strategy pursued by past Republican administrations to use the Justice Department for the White House’s ends, rather than their stated mission of serving the country more broadly. The George W. Bush administration courted similar controversy after firing US attorneys unwilling to pursue dubious voter-fraud cases, with a subsequent inspector general report finding that the dismissals “raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecution decisions.”
A former federal prosecutor, Daniel Richman, told the Times that “there are a number of U.S. attorney’s offices across the country that have been caught in various partisan efforts that have reduced the quality of the work they do, and the respect they get.”
