Fox News contributor on Trump's firing of Maureen Comey: “It's sheer vindictiveness”
Andy McCarthy: “He decided to reach down and swat her because she is the daughter of his political nemesis”
Published
Citation
From the July 17, 2025, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom
GILLIAN TURNER (ANCHOR): What do you make of this track record on her part, on Maureen's part, before we get into her dad?
ANDY MCCARTHY (CONTRIBUTOR): Well Gillian, she got high-profile cases in the premier federal prosecutors' office in the United States. So it says that she was a pretty good prosecutor, which is what the track record bears out. I think what happened here is clearly retributive. The Trump administration opened what I think is a baseless criminal prosecution, or criminal investigation at least, against Jim Comey last week. I wrote about this over the weekend. The president doesn't like Comey. He thinks with a lot of reason that Comey tried to take his first administration down. He promised to be the retribution president, and this is part of the retribution. He's got the constitutional authority to do it. But I think it stinks.
TURNER: So the president has made no bones about the fact that he doesn't like Comey, he doesn't trust him, he doesn't want him working or touching on anything that will impact his sort of second term in office. Were there any other -- and by extension, you know, his family members -- did the president have other options here?
MCCARTHY: Yeah, he could have, especially if he wants the Jeffrey Epstein talk-talk-talk to go away, he could have done nothing. She's just, she's a line prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. She's got nothing to do with the president. She was evidently doing a fine job, and she could have just gone about doing the public business, which is what the 200 or so prosecutors in that office have always strived to do.
He decided to reach down and swat her because she is the daughter of his political nemesis. The Constitution gives him the authority to do that. I mean, to the extent this is legally interesting, it's that the president is trying to show that he's got the authority to fire executive branch subordinates even if they're protected by Congress' civil service laws. That's the interesting legal aspect of this. But as far as a story, it's sheer vindictiveness.