WASHINGTON — A top national security prosecutor in a key federal office was fired Wednesday after a pro-Trump writer, without evidence, linked him to internal pushback over the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey last week.
Michael Ben’Ary, a veteran prosecutor who was serving as chief of the national security unit for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, was fired on Wednesday, three sources familiar with the situation told NBC News.
The firing came hours after Julie Kelly, a writer who advocated for Jan. 6 defendants and is deeply connected to the Trump administration, had written on X that the public “can only assume” that Ben-Ary “was a big part of the internal resistance” to indicting Comey.
It’s not clear if the Trump administration saw Kelly’s tweet. Asked about her post and Ben’Ary’s firing, the White House referred comment to the Justice Department. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the reason for the firing; the department does not comment on personnel matters.
Contrary to Kelly’s assertion on Twitter, the three sources say Ben’Ary did not work on the Comey case. Ben’Ary did not respond to a request for comment.
The decision to indict Comey has been heavily criticized by legal experts and former DOJ employees, as well as a group of former state and federal judges.
Ben’Ary’s dismissal followed the firing last week of Maya Song, another DOJ prosecutor who worked in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Both Ben’Ary and Song previously worked under former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who oversaw the early stages of the federal investigations into Trump. Trump posted on his social media website last week that Monaco’s current employer, Microsoft, should “immediately terminate” her, calling Monaco “corrupt and total Trump deranged” and a “menace to U.S. national security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has” with the government.
Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury last week on two felony counts. Career lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office had written a “declination memo” outlining their concerns that the case was not strong enough to win a conviction at trial, a senior Justice Department official previously told NBC News. While a majority of the federal grand jurors found there was probable cause to indict Comey on two charges, they rejected a third charge.
In the week before the Comey indictment, the former interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, resigned under pressure from the White House after reports that he was opposed to prosecuting New York Attorney General Letitia James regarding a mortgage fraud investigation. Trump told reporters he wanted Siebert out.
Trump then appointed his former personal lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan has no previous criminal prosecution experience.
A source familiar with the grand jury proceedings previously confirmed that Halligan presented the Comey case to the grand jury by herself, and her signature was the only one on the indictment and charging documents, an unusual break from typical Justice Department procedure.
Kelly told NBC News she believes Ben’Ary should have been ousted even if he played no role in the Comey case or the pushback against it.
“You can’t have someone who was a top official for Lisa Monaco at the same time she was orchestrating the lawfare against the president, against his associates, and 1,600 of his supporters who participated in Jan. 6, have a top role at one of the most powerful U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the country,” Kelly said.
Kelly said that one of the themes of Trump’s campaign was cleaning up the “corrupt” Justice Department and FBI, which brought two federal cases against Trump related to his handling of classified documents and his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
“You can’t clean up the Department of Justice without getting rid of the people who are responsible either directly or indirectly with weaponizing the DOJ,” Kelly said.
At a time of both international and domestic turmoil, the Justice Department has lost a significant number of experts in counterterrorism since the beginning of the Trump administration. In addition to the departures, the chief of the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section, Matt Blue, has been on leave since August. As a member of the National Guard, he has been patrolling the streets of Washington as part of Trump’s deployment after a DOGE staffer nicknamed “Big Balls” was assaulted during a late-night attempted carjacking.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia has a small national security section, according to a former DOJ national security prosecutor, who said the brain drain of expertise at the Justice Department overall would impact national security cases in federal districts across the country.
“You have a lot of people looking at each other, wondering who’s in charge,” they said. “There aren’t enough people. And when there aren’t enough people, it makes everything slow down.”
