New Trump Scandal: Why Was Comey’s Daughter Fired?

Summary

Bulwark Takes Episode Summary: "New Trump Scandal: Why Was Comey’s Daughter Fired?"

Release Date: July 17, 2025
Host/Authors: Tim O’Brien, Sarah Longwell, and Bill Kristol
Podcast: Bulwark Takes by The Bulwark

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1. Introduction to the Scandal

In this episode of Bulwark Takes, Tim O’Brien and Sarah Longwell delve into a developing scandal involving Maureen Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director Jim Comey. Maureen, a federal prosecutor renowned for her work on high-profile cases against Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sean "Diddy" Combs, was recently fired from the Department of Justice (DOJ) without any publicly provided reason.

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2. Background on Maureen Comey's Firing

The episode opens with Tim O’Brien introducing the central issue: Maureen Comey’s abrupt termination from the DOJ. Tim comments on the lack of explanation provided for her dismissal, setting the stage for a discussion filled with speculation and concern over potential political motivations.

Tim O’Brien [00:30]:
"Federal prosecutor Maureen Comey, who worked on the criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein, Angelaine Maxwell, as well as more recently on the case against Sean Diddy Combs, was fired from the DOJ. No reason been given why though."

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3. Speculations on the Reasons Behind the Firing

Sarah Longwell and Tim O’Brien explore possible explanations for Maureen's termination. They consider two main theories:

1. Retaliation Against Jim Comey: Given Jim Comey's contentious relationship with the Trump administration, there is speculation that Maureen's firing is an act of retribution against her father.

2. Professional Dismissal: Alternatively, Maureen may have been let go due to her involvement in sensitive cases, particularly those related to sex crimes and trafficking, which could have made her a target for political maneuvering within the DOJ.

Sarah Longwell [01:15]:
"Either it's retribution against him or because she has been on the Epstein beat and because her name is Comey, and they don't trust her to be a good soldier the way Pam Bondi and Cash Patel are being good soldiers, they wanted her out of there quickly."

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4. Maureen Comey's Statement

The hosts highlight Maureen Comey's farewell statement, which underscores her commitment to impartiality and integrity within the DOJ. She emphasized that access to power and money should not influence justice and criticized the politicization of the Justice Department.

Maureen Comey’s Statement [02:37]:
"Fear is the tool of a tyrant."
"Let this moment fuel the fire that already burns at the heart of this place. A fire of righteous indignation at abuses of power, of commitment to seek justice for victims, of dedication to truth above all else."

Sarah praises the statement, interpreting it as a clear condemnation of political interference.

Sarah Longwell [04:27]:
"That statement is so powerful. And these guys are such cowards. Like, it is so pathetic."

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5. Interview Insights with Jim Comey

Tim O’Brien shares insights from a recent interview with Jim Comey, where the former FBI Director discusses his daughter’s work and the challenges she faces. Maureen expressed pride in her work but also conveyed concerns about the emotional toll of prosecuting sex crimes.

Jim Comey [07:50]:
"She has a gift, and I worry about it because that kind of stuff can really chew you up. But she has a gift, and so it's, I think she's doing very well."

Maureen also touched on the difficulties of balancing personal pride in her daughter’s work with the public scrutiny that comes with her last name.

Maureen Comey [07:57]:
"Honestly, I am known as her father."

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6. Implications for the DOJ and FBI

The discussion shifts to the broader implications of Maureen’s firing on the DOJ and FBI. The hosts express concern that her dismissal signals a troubling trend of undermining professionalism and integrity within these institutions.

Jim Comey [04:47]:
"They are unable to put that aside and be grownups and do the job of protecting the country and prosecuting bad guys and working alongside people that they're different from. Instead, they would rather push anybody like that out and have only toadies around and consequences be damned."

Sarah underscores the importance of maintaining high standards within the DOJ, emphasizing that high-caliber cases require competent and dedicated prosecutors.

Sarah Longwell [05:36]:
"If she's picking up these really big cases, she's a very good prosecutor. And so like, you don't give those people, you don't give those cases to your, you know, screw-ups. You give them to your best people."

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7. The Epstein Scandal and Accountability

The hosts link Maureen’s firing to the ongoing Epstein scandal, suggesting that it exacerbates the public’s perception of systemic failures in holding powerful individuals accountable for sex crimes.

Jim Comey [10:37]:
"Elite sex criminals were getting away with it, and they're being protected by other powerful elite people. And that is an outrage. And that is what undergirds the outrage about Trump continuing to cover that up."

They argue that Maureen’s removal from the DOJ not only hinders justice in specific cases but also deepens distrust in the system’s ability to prosecute high-profile offenders impartially.

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8. Final Thoughts and Call to Action

In their concluding remarks, the hosts express admiration for Maureen Comey’s dedication and integrity. They highlight the need for more individuals within the DOJ to speak out against politicization and advocate for true justice.

Sarah Longwell [08:58]:
"This is clearly a person with a lot of integrity who is good at her job. And my hope is that with a statement like she put out after she left, that she is somebody who becomes vocal about what happened."

Tim O’Brien emphasizes the importance of public support and awareness, urging listeners to stay informed and engage with the ongoing developments.

Tim O’Brien [11:23]:
"We have a lot to say. Maureen Comey thank you. Everybody else subscribe to the feed and we got a lot more coming, so we'll see you soon."

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Conclusion

This episode of Bulwark Takes provides a comprehensive and critical examination of Maureen Comey’s firing from the DOJ, exploring potential political motives and the broader implications for the justice system. Through insightful analysis and poignant quotes, Tim O’Brien and Sarah Longwell shed light on the challenges faced by dedicated public servants in maintaining integrity amidst political pressures. The discussion underscores the importance of holding powerful individuals accountable and preserving the non-partisan nature of the Department of Justice.

Transcript

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[Tim O'Brien]

Tim O from the Bulwark here with publisher Sarah Longwell. The kind of wannabe fascists at the.

[Jim Comey]

DOJ are at it again and they're targeting Jim Comey's daughter. Now here's a story from late last night.

[Tim O'Brien]

Federal prosecutor Maureen Comey, who worked on the criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein, Angelaine.

[Jim Comey]

Maxwell, as well as more recently on the case against Sean Diddy Combs was fired from the doj.

[Tim O'Brien]

No reason been given why though. I think that we could do some speculation here which we're about to.

[Jim Comey]

The notice was signed by a political appointee of President Trump.

[Tim O'Brien]

So I want your. I actually got to talk to Jim.

[Jim Comey]

Comey about his daughter a little while ago. So I wanna play that tape for folks. But first I'm curious Sarah, your kind of top line thoughts when you saw the story come across.

[Sarah Longwell]

I mean here's what's crazy is that and I didn't know this. Did you know this that Comey's daughter. I guess you did when you talked to him, but that she prosecuted both Epstein and just Lane Maxwell and she was also on the Diddy trial because she does sex. Sex trafficking things. And so it, it feels like it is part of. There's like two ways you could go at this. Is it retribution against Comey, Jim Comey, who we now know they were trailing him after he posted that Seashell like Instagram thing and everybody just said that, you know, made up this idea that somehow he was saying it was, you know, kill the President, which is absolutely not true. Guys. 86 means to fire, means to or to get rid of. That is not what it was. But so either it's retribution against him or because she has been on the Epstein beat and because her name is Comey and they don't trust her to be a good soldier the way Pam Bondi and Cash Patel are being good soldiers, they Wanted her out of there quickly. My only my like knee jerk reaction to that though is, do you want her outside able to talk like that feels. And I hope she, like, can she talk now? That would be my hope is that we could actually hear from her.

[Tim O'Brien]

Yeah, well, she put out a statement.

[Jim Comey]

I just, I'm just saying this now. It just came out a little bit ago. It was kind of a goodbye email to colleagues when she was at doj.

[Tim O'Brien]

She wanted to make sure people with.

[Jim Comey]

Access to money and power were not treated differently than anyone else and making sure that this office remains separate from politics and focused only on the facts and the law. She went on to say, fear is the tool of a tyrant. And I think it's not too hard to read between the lines there. So I had a pretty strong statement against this that at least from Maureen Comey's perspective, this was politics. They are trying to get politics. They're politicizing the Justice Department and they're trying to intimidate her and intimidate other people. And I don't, I don't know how you could read this any other way. So I do hope that she continues to speak out. I think it's tough. You leave these sort of situations. I did the interview yesterday with Mike Feinberg. Got kicked out of the FBI and.

[Tim O'Brien]

Good on him for reaching out. But one of the things that he said in that interview was like, there are a lot of other people that have either been pushed out or, you know, nudged out or kicked out that haven't talked because it brings attention onto you might hurt your ability to get another job. Right.

[Jim Comey]

Like, there are a lot of reasons not to do that.

[Tim O'Brien]

So there are more people being kicked.

[Jim Comey]

Out of like DOJ and FBI than I think we even realize. But given the, I think the kind of bright light on her, I think it's going to be kind of hard for her not to be public. But I don't know.

[Sarah Longwell]

Well, I, I do want to. Can I just read more of her statement? Because her statement is excellent. Like, fear is the tool of a tyrant wielded to suppress independent thought instead of fear. Let this moment fuel the fire that already burns at the heart of this place. A fire of righteous indignation at abuses of power, of commitment to seek justice for victims, of dedication to true to truth above all else. That's good stuff. And that. And I, I think this is the beginning of something, not the end of something. And you know, it is. It's wild that she is the daughter of James Comey and that all of life is a flat circle, man.

[Jim Comey]

Or like these guys coming after her.

[Tim O'Brien]

I mean, like, good on that state. Like, that statement is so powerful. And these guys are such cowards. Like, it is so pathetic. She used the word fear is exactly right. There's such, like, you can't work with Jim Comey's daugh. Like, that's really what this is like that they do not feel capable of.

[Jim Comey]

Having a colleague who has worked on a case that is maybe going to be politically uncomfortable for them, who has a father that has been vocal in opposition to the administration, but they're unable to put that aside and be grownups and do the job of protecting the country and prosecuting bad guys and working alongside people that they're different from. Instead of that, what they would rather do is push anybody like that out and have only toadies around and consequences be damned.

[Sarah Longwell]

You know, these departments, these, these institutions, they run on professionalism. Right. They run on lesser professional codes. And this is like deeply unprofessional behavior. They have given no reason for. I mean, by all means, if she's picking up these really big cases, she's a very good prosecutor.

[Tim O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Sarah Longwell]

And so like, you don't give those people, you don't give those cases to your, you know, screw ups. You give them to your best people.

[Tim O'Brien]

So she's clearly not like babies. You know, it's kind of like you got to be able to actually get the convictions. You got to be able to, like, do the job.

[Jim Comey]

It's like you're rising up through the ranks just because, like your dad.

[Tim O'Brien]

And frankly, it probably hurt her, it doesn't help her.

[Sarah Longwell]

Yeah, that's what I was just going to say. There's no way that the name, last name Comey now for her doesn't carry anything but like, not baggage exactly, but like a. Yeah, there's baggage. There's also the knowledge that, especially now that Trump's in office, that she would get undue scrutiny.

[Tim O'Brien]

And so on this front, I want to play the clip because. So when I had no thoughts about any of this, I interviewed Jim Comey.

[Jim Comey]

Time is flat circle, like you said.

[Tim O'Brien]

Could have been three months ago, could.

[Jim Comey]

Have been last week, I don't know.

[Tim O'Brien]

But at some point after he was.

[Sarah Longwell]

In between that, I think it was like five or six, five weeks ago or something.

[Tim O'Brien]

At some point after he did the.

[Jim Comey]

Seashell meme, he was on the podcast and I asked him about his daughter because in the context of the Diddy case, since it was ongoing at the time, and I just want to play a little bit from it. Can you give me a brief? Have you been following her work?

[Tim O'Brien]

What's happening? What's the progress?

[Maureen Comey]

Yeah, I follow it through the New York Times does regular updates. They have people in the courtroom who send out little updates. So that's my way for following it. She won't talk to me about the case and won't let me go. She will let my wife go and watch. But if I go, quote, it'll be a thing, dad. Close quote. And so I don't get to go, but I follow it online because you can't. It's federal courts. There's no cameras. You're not getting real time transcripts. So I follow it from the little snippets sent out by reporters.

[Jim Comey]

And how's she doing?

[Maureen Comey]

She's doing great. She's really good and better than I. And her passion has been sex crimes, sex trafficking, working with victims. She has a gift, and I worry about it because that kind of stuff can really chew you up. But she has a gift, and so it's. I think she's doing very well.

[Tim O'Brien]

Well, that's cool, though, that you get to kind of. Even though you don't get to literally.

[Jim Comey]

Watch because know you don't want it.

[Tim O'Brien]

To be a thing, it's cool to have a daughter that's doing that. Right. You gotta. You gotta be brimming with pride.

[Maureen Comey]

Yeah, I am. I worried when she said she wanted to do it and that she would go where I worked as a federal prosecutor, as a line prosecutor, where I was the U.S. attorney. And here's the true thing. I worried she would be known as my daughter. Honestly, I am known as her father.

[Tim O'Brien]

You can see that. It's. It's really kind of sad for me to rewatch that because you can see a.

[Jim Comey]

A dad that's beaming with pride and.

[Tim O'Brien]

Also a dad that, like, knows that he's a bit of baggage and was worried about that and was like, really proud that, like, she was able to overcome that, kind of because of her skill and how good of a prosecutor she is. And now like a month later to.

[Jim Comey]

See that she still is getting targeted because these little wannabe authoritarians, like, can't. Can't handle it.

[Sarah Longwell]

Yeah. And I'll just, I'll say one last thing about people who do the sex crimes work, which is what she does when he is talking about, you know, she's got a gift.

[Jim Comey]

Yeah.

[Sarah Longwell]

Think about that job. Think about the things you have to watch, the things you have to hear. It is the kind of Thing that people, if you're a human being, like, you think about these people's kind of cogs in a machine or their. This is their job. Like, it impacts them. Like, there's a whole network of, like, mental health professionals that are there to work with. The people who deal with sex crime stuff. It's like, it's like genuine public service. Like, not everybody's looking to work in the sex crimes stuff because it's not a pleasant place to be. And. And all I can think is this is clearly a person with a lot of integrity who is good at her job. And my hope is that with a statement like she put out after she left, that she is somebody who becomes vocal about what happened. Especially because the extent to which we have no information right now, I mean, and I think if we ever get information, you're not gonna be able to trust it from Trump and the doj.

[Tim O'Brien]

And there's nothing else that could even be. Honestly, I don't know. The thing that I think about, just listening to you talk right there about.

[Jim Comey]

The sex crimes investigations and her work there and how hard and traumatic that is, how challenging it is to kind of hold these guys to account. Like we've seen. I can say what you want about, like, the extensions of the Epstein case and other MeToo cases, like, how hard it is Donald Trump, how hard it is to get these people held to account.

[Tim O'Brien]

And, like, you probably won't hear this from the MAGA media because of her last name, but to the extent that there is, you know, kind of outside the political conversation around Epstein, like, a genuine feeling among people that sex criminals were getting away with it and powerful.

[Jim Comey]

Elite sex criminals were getting away with it, and they're being protected by other powerful elite people. And that is an outrage. And that is what undergirds kind of the outrage about Trump continuing to cover that up.

[Tim O'Brien]

Like, this actually makes Epstein scandal worse. Not because she knows any secret information, because it's like, once again, shows these guys don't actually care about going after sex criminals.

[Jim Comey]

Like, they don't care about accountability for any sort of elite, powerful pedophiles, because.

[Tim O'Brien]

If they did, you would want somebody that's a good prosecutor who has experience successfully prosecuting these cases in your government, no matter what their last name is. You know, that's right. You got me riled up.

[Jim Comey]

I was.

[Tim O'Brien]

I was already mad, but you got.

[Jim Comey]

Me riled up just talking about that. All right, do you have any.

[Tim O'Brien]

Any final thoughts for Marine coming or.

[Sarah Longwell]

Audience come on the show, Maureen, we would love to talk to to America's Looking for Heroes right now. Looking for brave people.

[Tim O'Brien]

I appreciate all the work that you've.

[Jim Comey]

Done up to this date. Even if you don't come on the podcast, be should. It's a good podcast.

[Tim O'Brien]

We have a lot to say. Maureen Comey thank you. Everybody else subscribe to the feed and we got a lot more coming, so we'll see you soon.