Powerful U.S. Attorney's Office Infested with Trump Lawfare Associates

Controversy inside the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia over indicting James Comey exposed close professional and family ties to some of the worst lawfare perpetrators.

Before leaving the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia building on Friday for the last time, Michael Ben’Ary taped a letter on his office door.

Ben’Ary, who was fired Wednesday night reportedly because this reporter posted screenshots of his LinkedIn account on X showing he had recently worked for former deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco, wrote a lengthy call to action to his ex co-workers.

Insisting his firing by acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was undeserved and that Department of Justice leadership “is more concerned with punishing the President’s perceived enemies than they are with protecting our national security,” Ben’Ary urged his former colleagues to defy their higher-ups at President Trump’s DOJ. “I ask that each of you do the right thing. Follow the facts and the law. Stand up for what we all believe in --our Constitution and the rule of law. Our country depends on you.”

Full letter here. (Ben’Ary apparently did not win any brief-writing contests in law school.)

And in one poorly-written cookie cutter complaint, Ben’Ary—chief of the EDVA’s national security unit when he got the boot—undercut his own claims of political independence. Further, the American people are supposed to believe that the same guy now publicly advocating internal resistance at the DOJ did not play a role in privately attempting to torpedo the criminal case against James Comey after a two-month investigation.

News reports have disclosed the existence of a so-called “declination memo,” which outlined the reasons why EDVA prosecutors did not want to pursue a federal indictment against the corrupt and disgraced former FBI director for what appears to be his perjurious testimony before Congress in 2020. “Halligan has been advised by career prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office that seeking the charges would violate DOJ policy, raise serious ethical issues, and risk being rejected by the grand jury,” ABC News reported on September 25.

That same day, Halligan, who had never before presented a case to a grand jury, won a two-count indictment against Comey for making false statements and obstructing Congress.

But a review of the background of several current and former employees at the EDVA reveal ties to Democratic officials primarily responsible for the lawfare against President Trump.

Monaco Minions

For example, Ben’Ary’s association with Monaco, one of the key architects of the Russiagate hoax among other dirty tricks against the president, dates back to 2012. (The president recently called for Microsoft to fire Monaco as the company’s head of global affairs. He stripped Monaco of her security clearance earlier this year.)

As a prosecutor at EDVA, Ben’Ary worked with Monaco, at the time Barack Obama’s assistant attorney general for national security, to prosecute a Virginia resident for plotting a suicide bombing of the U.S. Capitol.

One month after the FBI’s armed search of Mar-a-Lago in 2022, Monaco, who had a role in authorizing the raid, named Ben’Ary as her senior counsel. At the time, Monaco was handling the day-to-day machinations related to both criminal investigations into Trump—one for his involvement in the events of January 6 and one for allegedly hoarding classified files.

In November 2022, Monaco’s former Obama DOJ colleague Jack Smith was named special counsel to purportedly take over the investigations. But Smith did little more than move existing DOJ prosecutors and FBI investigators from headquarters over to the special counsel’s office. And only the most naive individual, or paid lawfare pushers such as Fusion Ken, would believe Monaco distanced herself from the proceedings at that point.

Monaco promoted Ben’Ary to associate deputy attorney general in 2023, making him a key figure in her senior leadership team. In June 2023, Smith indicted Trump in the classified documents case; two months later, he indicted Trump on four counts related to the events of Jan 6. It appears Ben’Ary returned to EDVA shortly before Trump’s inauguration last January.

Ties to the Lawfare Axis of Evil

But Ben’Ary was not the only top official at EDVA with deep ties to the ‘Get Trump’ cabal of bad actors including Monaco, Comey, and Smith:

• Maya Song, the first assistant in the office before she was fired last week, served as Monaco’s senior counsel from August 2023 until October 2024.

• The spouse of another top prosecutor in the office, Drew Bradylyons, worked directly for Monaco for almost the entirety of Biden’s term in office. Lisa Miller, Bradylyons’ wife, was appointed deputy associate attorney general in October 2021 and remained in that position until January 2025. Miller oversaw more than 200 prosecutors in one of the DOJ’s criminal divisions and reported directly to Monaco.

• The father-in-law of Erik Siebert, the head of EDVA office until he was forced to resign last month amid pressure from Trump, is godfather to one of Comey’s daughters.

• When the grand jury handed up the indictment last week, Troy Edwards, who was Ben’Ary deputy, sat in the front row of the Alexandria courtroom. Edwards is Comey’s son-in-law; he quit after the indictment was announced.

• Jessica Aber, the Biden-appointed head of EDVA who resigned the day President Trump was sworn in, once worked for Smith when he headed the DOJ’s public integrity unit during the Obama administration. Aber helped prosecute, at Smith’s behest, former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell and his wife, in 2014. The Supreme Court unanimously overturned their conviction in 2016, in part blaming the government for criminalizing common political behavior. Aber had worked on the McDonnell case with David Harbach, who led Smith’s classified documents prosecution team in Florida until the case was dismissed last year. (Aber died in March 2025 of an epileptic seizure.)

• Matthew Burke led the EDVA’s public corruption office until he moved to Jack Smith’s office in 2022. According to his bio at his new gig, “Matt served as an Assistant Special Counsel under Special Counsel Jack Smith in the investigation of the efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election and the certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021. Matt further assisted in the prosecution of a former president that arose from that investigation.” Burke was fired in late January amid a purge of Smith’s prosecutors and investigators.

This sort of political incestuousness represents a pervasive crisis at the DOJ. How can the president hold people accountable for the lawfare against him—efforts that did not just result in the near-destruction of the president but also ensnared so many innocent people and misled the American people in the process—when the loyal foot soldiers of the lawfare perpetrators infest the entire department?

Investigations into other Trump tormentors are reportedly underway as the MAGA base grows increasingly impatient for results. But what happened at EDVA, where conflicted DOJ officials almost successfully sank the Comey indictment right before the statute of limitations expired, should be yet another example of what Trump officials are up against in overcoming the systemically corrupt DOJ.