More than a half-dozen prosecutors have been demoted or pushed out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia due to fallout from the Justice Department’s push to prosecute former FBI director James B. Comey, leaving a key prosecutorial office understaffed and weakened.
Others prosecutors have voluntarily decamped or scrambled to find new jobs, fearful they could be asked to work on cases that violate their principles, according to 10 current and former prosecutors familiar with the office and the case. Major cases, including one involving a terrorist attack in Afghanistan, have been hobbled by the turmoil.
That’s not to mention the money and investigative resources spent on the two indictments of Comey, which most legal analysts say have little merit and stem primarily from President Donald Trump’s animus toward the former FBI chief.
As the Justice Department gears up for the second prosecution of Comey, the costs to the department of the president’s crusade are mounting. The shock waves rippling through the Justice Department underline the high price of the president’s single-minded pursuit of his adversaries to its personnel, resources and mission.
The results so far have been limited at best. The first indictment of Comey, in which he was accused of lying to Congress in 2018 about whether he was responsible for leaks, was dismissed by a judge who ruled that the U.S. attorney bringing the case had been unlawfully appointed. The second indictment, issued by a grand jury last week, accuses Comey of threatening the president’s life on social media 10 months ago, and many attorneys say it misstates the current legal standard for what is considered a legitimate threat.
The Justice Department is now weighing whether to seek yet another indictment of Comey, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation. This case would also relate to the 2018 episode, but would focus on the alleged leaking itself rather than Comey’s statements to Congress.
Such relentless pursuit of someone singled out by the president carries serious costs, former federal prosecutors said.
“Criminal investigations and prosecutions based on political vendettas delegitimize law enforcement,” said John Keller, the former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, who resigned after refusing demands by the Trump administration to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams (D). “For career prosecutors who have spent their lives seeking to promote justice through impartial apolitical enforcement, this new era is offensive and demoralizing.”
“A North Carolina grand jury indicted Comey, and he’ll have his day in court like any other defendant. It would be unfair to the prosecution teams and to Comey himself to reveal any further details,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.
The most pernicious impact of the Comey investigations, Keller and others said, is the potential erosion of public trust in the Justice Department.
Trump has been so open and vehement in his desire to get Comey and other political foes, they say, that they fear the public has become skeptical of even legitimate investigations of Democrats or other political adversaries of the president.
That diminished trust, they said, could affect grand jurors, who are tasked with deciding whether government cases can proceed.
“There are both short-term and long-term costs,” said Jonathan Kravis, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who now works at the law firm Liu Shur Kravis. “The department and FBI lose some credibility. That’s credibility with grand juries or juries. And the FBI’s credibility with sources and in interviews … it’s not just this case, it extends into other cases.”
For years, Trump has railed against Comey, whom he fired during his first term because of the FBI director’s involvement in investigating his 2016 presidential campaign’s possible ties to Russia. Once Trump was sworn in for his second term, his calls to prosecute Comey became more direct.
In September, the president forced the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik S. Siebert, to resign after Siebert determined that there was insufficient evidence to pursue charges against Comey for lying to Congress. Siebert also found insufficient grounds to charge New York Attorney General Letitia James with mortgage fraud.
Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — currently the acting attorney general — fought to keep Siebert in his position, The Washington Post reported at the time. Siebert was known as a respected conservative prosecutor who had earned praise from White House officials for his efforts on immigration enforcement and other Trump administration priorities.
“He didn’t quit, I fired him!” Trump wrote on social media after Siebert left the office.
Siebert was not alone in facing consequences for his reluctance to prosecute Comey. His deputy Maya Song was demoted and later pushed out of the department altogether.
Song had been assigned to the Justice Department’s Oct. 7 task force — a much-hyped panel that was designed to investigate the Hamas militants who kidnapped and killed more than 40 Americans during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, and to probe antisemitic attacks in the United States.
With the ousting of Song and other national security experts across the department and FBI, the task force has struggled and has largely been disbanded.
On Sept. 20, a few days after Siebert’s resignation, Trump posted a message on social media directed at then-Attorney General Pam Bondi calling on her to prosecute Comey, James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California).
“They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” Trump wrote. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
With Siebert and Song out, Trump installed Lindsey Halligan — a close ally of the president with no prosecutorial experience — to run the Virginia office and secure indictments against Comey and James. She personally presented the cases to the grand jurors and won the indictments.
But a judge dismissed both of those cases, ruling that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney. A few months later, she was forced to leave when the district’s federal judges said they intended to replace her.
Now, multiple defendants indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia are asking for their cases to be dismissed on the basis that Halligan was unlawfully appointed.
The judges unanimously selected a new U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, but Blanche immediately fired him, and months later, the office remains leaderless.
The head of the office’s criminal section was also demoted amid the fallout from the Comey indictment. That critical position, too, remains vacant months later, according to people familiar with the office.
The Justice Department brought in two career prosecutors from North Carolina to help Halligan with the Comey and James prosecutions. Both those prosecutors have since left the department.
And the ripple effect from the Comey prosecutions continues to grow.
Michael Ben’Ary, who ran the national security division in the Eastern District of Virginia, was pushed out after a right-wing influencer baselessly accused him of pushing back against the Comey prosecution. Ben’Ary was not involved in the matter.
Ben’Ary had been leading the prosecution team in a high-profile case against an alleged planner of the 2021 suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, which killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 Afghans. Troy Edwards, the deputy director of the National Security Section, was also on the case. He is Comey’s son-in-law and left the office when Comey was initially indicted.
Trump had publicly described the suspect, Mohammad Sharifullah, as “the top terrorist” behind the 2021 attack at the airport’s Abbey Gate. But in late April, a jury, while convicting Sharifullah of a terrorism offense, deadlocked and declined to find him guilty of playing a deadly role in that specific attack — a setback for the Justice Department in one of the highest-profile terrorism prosecutions of Trump’s second term.
Sharifullah’s conviction carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.
It is impossible to know whether the outcome would have been different had Ben’Ary and Edwards stayed on the case. But after Ben’Ary was fired, he left a scorching letter taped to his office door, warning that his abrupt departure could hurt the Abbey Gate trial, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The Post.
Ben’Ary also accused the Trump administration in his letter of caring more about prosecuting the president’s enemies than national security, the letter said.
Months earlier, Comey’s daughter, a respected attorney who prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein, was also forced out of her job at the high-profile U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. She is suing the department over what she has called her unlawful dismissal. A judge recently declined the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the case.
The latest indictment in North Carolina against Comey stems from a photo the former FBI director posted online showing seashells on a beach that were arranged to write out “86 47.” Trump is the 47th president; “86” can mean banning or removing someone, but it can also be used as slang for killing a person.
Comey quickly removed the post after receiving criticism that it could be seen as threatening violence. Comey has asserted innocence and pledged to fight the charges. His attorneys say they plan to file a motion to dismiss the case as a vindictive prosecution.
Trump officials, including Blanche, frequently say it is the Biden administration that weaponized the Justice Department by prosecuting Trump. Rather than politicizing the department, they say, they are fixing what President Joe Biden broke.
Blanche told CBS News this week that it was “extraordinarily hypocritical and extraordinarily rich” for critics to accuse Trump of weaponizing the Justice Department, since they had “remained dead silent for four years” as the Biden Justice Department pursued Trump.
Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, named a special counsel in 2022 to investigate allegations that Trump had sought to overturn the 2020 election and improperly taken classified documents from the White House. Those prosecutions ended when Trump won the election, with the Justice Department under Garland citing federal regulations that say a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.
Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this report.
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