A senior national security prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia said in a farewell note taped to his door to colleagues on Friday that he was apparently fired this week because a January 6 conspiracy theorist denounced him on social media for having worked for the deputy attorney general in the Biden administration.
The veteran federal prosecutor, Michael Ben’Ary, was fired on Wednesday, the same day that Julie Kelly, a pro-Trump commentator who once called a Capitol police officer beaten by the pro-Trump mob on January 6 a “crisis actor”, suggested on social media that Ben’Ary was an ally of his former boss, Lisa Monaco, a senior justice department official who helped drive the investigation of Donald Trump’s role in the Capitol riot.
“It appears that my termination was based on little more than a single social media post containing false information,” Ben’Ary wrote. “The leadership is more concerned with punishing the President’s perceived enemies than they are with protecting our national security.”
“I am troubled that I was removed so abruptly in the middle of important work,” Ben’Ary wrote, making specific mention of his role in the prosecution of a suspected member of the Islamic State’s Afghan branch for planning the deadly suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate entrance to the Kabul airport during the US withdrawal in 2021 which killed 13 American service members and scores of Afghan civilians.
When charges against the suspected orchestrator of the attack were announced in March by Erik Siebert, then interim US attorney, the two assistant US attorneys named to lead the prosecution were Ben’Ary and Troy Edwards. All three career prosecutors are now gone for political reasons.
Siebert was forced out by Donald Trump for declining to bring charges against James Comey, citing a lack of evidence that the former FBI director committed any crime. Edwards, a national security prosecutor and Comey’s son-in-law, resigned after the former Trump aide installed to take Siebert’s place brought charges against Comey anyway. On Wednesday, Ben’Ary was informed in writing that he had been terminated with immediate effect, shortly after Kelly made a conspiratorial post about him.
“Justice for Americans killed and injured by our enemies should not be contingent on what someone in the Department of Justice sees in their social media feed that day,” Ben’Ary wrote.
In January, the day after Trump returned to office and pardoned all of the Capitol rioters, including those who had attacked police officers, Charlie Kirk revealed on his podcast that Kelly had helped him convince Trump to issue those pardons in a phone call days before Trump’s second inaugural.
