Earlier this year, Maureen Comey was abruptly—and, let’s face it, wrongly—terminated from her job as a federal prosecutor for the extreme misdeed of being former FBI Director James Comey’s daughter. It also probably didn’t help that she worked on the prosecutions of both accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Comey sued the Trump administration in September, but the Department of Justice has been so loath to deal with it that at first, they just wouldn’t—as in they literally wouldn’t even respond to the lawsuit or have an attorney enter an appearance.
That’s because no one in her former office in Manhattan would agree to handle the case, nor would the Brooklyn office. The Federal Branch Program of the DOJ, which typically handles big cases like this, also said it wouldn’t take it.
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The only office that agreed to the case was the Northern District of New York, where John Sarcone is the acting U.S. attorney. You might know Sarcone’s name from his antics, like listing a boarded-up building as his residence in the district. Or perhaps when he claimed he was “chased with a knife and threatened” by an undocumented immigrant, Saul Morales-Garcia.
That claim sort of fell apart when video showed that Garcia never got within 20 feet of Sarcone. Additionally, that doesn’t really explain why Sarcone lied and said he was living in a boarded-up building.
Sarcone is also another of President Donald Trump’s Fake Appointee Specials, a choice so toxic that he would never get through the Senate confirmation process, and the judges in his district refused to appoint him as well.
So, the administration is trying to string together temporary appointments, with the DOJ first naming him a special attorney, then designating him as the first assistant attorney, at which point he magically ascended to being the acting U.S. attorney.
If this sounds familiar, it is because the administration has tried this with several terrible Trump picks: Alina Habba in New Jersey, Sigal Chattah in Nevada, Bill Essayli in the Central District of California, and, of course, Lindsey Halligan in the Northern District of Virginia. Courts have told all of those folks that they are not legally in their jobs.
Sarcone’s turn for that is coming, and it’s sort of delicious. The person challenging Sarcone’s appointment is none other than New York Attorney General Letitia James. Sarcone has demanded that James turn over all material related to cases against Trump and the National Rifle Association, which, nope.
But Sarcone’s real value to the administration is that he is just as willing as Halligan to do Trump’s dirty work.
Which brings us back to Maureen Comey. Sarcone’s argument is that Comey has to go through the administrative process for federal employees and bring a claim before the Merit Systems Protection Board. Comey’s pushback is that this was no ordinary firing, and the courts have to sort out whether Trump’s Article II authority allows him to reach down and fire civil service line attorneys.
Additionally, telling Comey she has to go through the MSPB is absurd. Trump hobbled that board for months by illegally removing member Cathy Harris and destroying a quorum, so the board couldn’t hear any cases until October, when Trump finally stuffed some GOP goon onto the independent federal agency.
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Because the administration illegally fired so many federal employees and shut the board down for months, it now has 11,166 appeals to handle—more than double the normal workload.
The administration knows full well Comey would have to wait literal years for that process. It also knows full well that firing Comey by saying that the president has Article II authority to do so is unlikely to hold up in court. Well, at least in all courts but the Supreme Court, which may yet again decide to do Trump’s bidding on that one.
Good luck, John Sarcone. You’ve got the same vindictive spirit as Lindsey Halligan, but you’re facing a Comey. That didn’t work out so well for Halligan, now did it?
