A top national security prosecutor who was fired this week from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia assailed the Justice Department in a blistering letter on Friday for being more concerned with pursuing President Trump’s political opponents than with protecting the United States against terrorist attacks and other threats.
The prosecutor, Michael P. Ben’Ary, had served as the chief of the national security section in the Virginia prosecutor’s office, which has long handled some of the most important terrorism cases in the country. But he was removed on Wednesday evening, just hours after a right-wing journalist wrongly suggested on social media that he had played a role in pushing back on the decision by Lindsey Halligan, the district’s new Trump-installed U.S. attorney, to bring an indictment against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.
After cleaning out his belongings, Mr. Ben’Ary posted a letter to his former colleagues on the door of his office in Alexandria, Va., saying that he believed his firing, coming after other departures from the office in the wake of the charges against Mr. Comey, would leave the country less safe.
“This example highlights the most troubling aspect of the current operations of the Department of Justice: The leadership is more concerned with punishing the president’s perceived enemies than they are with protecting our national security,” he wrote. “Justice for Americans killed and injured by our enemies should not be contingent on what someone in the Department of Justice sees in their social media feed that day.”
That appeared to be a reference to a message posted online by Julie Kelly, a writer who has long advocated on behalf of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and who is close to Trump-allied figures like Ed Martin, the leader of the Justice Department working group that has the responsibility of pursuing the president’s adversaries.
In her message, Ms. Kelly wrote that she believed that Mr. Ben’Ary “was a big part of the internal resistance” in the U.S. attorney’s office to indicting Mr. Comey. She also asserted that he had been a “top aide” to Lisa Monaco, who had served as the deputy attorney general during the Biden administration and who has long been a boogeyman for Mr. Trump and his allies.
Mr. Ben’Ary, however, did not take part in the effort to persuade Ms. Halligan, who had never worked as a prosecutor until she got her new job, to avoid bringing charges against Mr. Comey, according to people familiar with the matter. Several top prosecutors in the office told Ms. Halligan that there was not enough evidence to support filing charges, echoing the sentiment of her predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, who resigned under pressure from Mr. Trump last month rather than seek to indict Mr. Comey.
While Mr. Ben’Ary, 49, worked under Ms. Monaco for a time, he did not work on political issues. He focused instead on coordinating with U.S. attorney’s offices around the country and on initiatives to stem the tide of fentanyl into the United States — an effort that Mr. Trump himself has championed. He joined the department in 2006 under President George W. Bush and served under attorneys general of both political parties.
Before he was fired, Mr. Ben’Ary was the lead prosecutor on one of the most consequential terrorism cases in the country: that of Mohammad Sharifullah, a member of an Islamist terrorist group who was arrested in March. He is being prosecuted for helping to plan and carry out the August 2021 attack at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 13 American service members and Afghan civilians during the chaotic U.S. troop withdrawal.
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, has several times trumpeted the Trump administration’s success in tracking down Mr. Sharifullah and taking him into custody. And Mr. Trump himself celebrated the arrest during his State of the Union address this year, declaring that Mr. Sharifullah would “face the swift sword of American justice.”
The case is scheduled for trial in December, and Mr. Ben’Ary’s departure leaves the trial team without both its leader and the person who had been working most closely with the victims’ families.
“While I have the utmost confidence in my co-counsel,” Mr. Ben’Ary wrote, “my abrupt, apparently thoughtless removal with no period of transition will hurt this case.”
The firing of Mr. Ben’Ary was only the latest example of how the fallout from the charges against Mr. Comey have damaged his former unit and the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia as a whole.
On the day Mr. Comey was indicted, accused of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding, his son-in-law, Troy A. Edwards Jr., resigned as Mr. Ben’Ary’s deputy in the national security section.
The office’s No. 2 person, Maya Song, was initially demoted after the indictment and briefly found a new job working under Mr. Ben’Ary on the national security team. But Ms. Song was fired last week, leaving the section — one of the most important in the prosecutor’s office — without a chief, a deputy chief and one of its most experienced lawyers.
Mr. Ben’Ary’s letter to his colleagues joins a growing list of similar missives written by federal prosecutors who have either by fired by the Trump administration or resigned in protest.
In February, two top prosecutors who resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, wrote widely read resignation letters.
Mr. Comey’s daughter, Maurene, who was fired from the same office in Manhattan in July, also wrote a letter to her colleagues, decrying the administration’s actions.
“Fear is the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought,” Ms. Comey wrote. “Instead of fear, let this moment fuel the fire that already burns at the heart of this place.”
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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