Maurene Comey

Named on the documents as	Maurene Comey and AUSA Comey; Maurene R. Comey in filed appearance blocks; and simply Maurene over an Assistant United States Attorney block when she signs her own e-mail1
Size of the file	718 documents on the exact phrase; union 951 across forms. ⚠⚠ AND THE FLOOR IS NOW PROVEN SHORT BY A MEASURED MINIMUM. A dataset-12 study of 2026-09-19 found that the government’s signature block is redacted RECIPROCALLY between productions: in one dataset the producer bars the U.S. Attorney’s surname and prints the line prosecutors in full; in three others the same sheets print the U.S. Attorney and bar the line prosecutors. Each copy hides what the other shows. Her name is therefore absent from a block of documents that no form of her name, surname included, can reach. The understatement is proved at a minimum of ten documents and is bounded above by 120, the whole barred-block population. The figure on this page is a floor in the strict sense and should never be quoted as her reach. See _desk/gate-reports/20260919T031200Z-dataset12-name-bar-test.md. ⚠ 299 of them never mention Epstein: this is a Maxwell file first2
The act this page is built on	She is the first-named author of the memorandum that set the rules for reviewing the image and video files taken from 62 devices seized from Epstein’s residences, written on 19 October 20203
What that memorandum promised	That at the end of the review the office would delete or return every copy of the full image and video files, that the FBI would lock off access to the full extractions, and that reviewing anything not marked responsive would require a new warrant3
And who reviewers were told to call	Her, personally — “at any time and with any questions or concerns, no matter how small”3
She also signed the grand jury subpoenas	Nine custodian certifications in the release recite subpoenas “signed by Assistant United States Attorney Maurene Comey”, dated 16 August, 3 September and 11 December 20194
What no document read here shows	Any charging decision of hers, anything she concluded from any device, or any dealing between her and any victim
Covered elsewhere on this wiki	Alison Moe and Lara Pomerantz, her co-authors · Ghislaine Maxwell · Audrey Strauss

Maurene R. Comey was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York and one of the prosecutors on the Epstein and Maxwell cases. She is a career federal prosecutor acting in her official capacity throughout everything on this page, and nothing here is a suggestion of wrongdoing by her.

What makes her worth a page is a single document. After Jeffrey Epstein’s houses were searched, the government held the contents of dozens of his devices. Somebody had to write down what investigators were and were not allowed to look at, and what would happen to the material afterwards. She wrote it, first-named of three.

The protocol

On 19 October 2020 a memorandum went into the case file, not to a distribution list but to the file itself, addressed To: Case File. It is signed by three Assistant United States Attorneys, Maurene Comey, Alison Moe and Lara Pomerantz, in that order.³

It begins with the scale of the problem:

On June 26, 2020, the FBI obtained a new warrant (the “Warrant”) authorizing review of the data from a total of 62 devices seized from both the New York and Virgin Islands searches of Epstein’s residence (the “Devices”).³

The memorandum’s job is to tell reviewers how to sort what was on them. ⚠ Its instructions are prospective sorting criteria, written before the review took place. They describe what reviewers were told to look for, and they do not describe, count, locate or attribute a single file. By those instructions a reviewer was to mark responsive any image or video of any female appearing to be under the age of 30, and to mark a file RESPONSIVE – HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL if it contained partial or full nudity.³

This page quotes those criteria because they are the rule the government wrote for itself, and it quotes nothing about what was found, because the memorandum says nothing about what was found.

What the office promised to do afterwards

The part of the memorandum that will matter longest is the part about destruction. It is two sentences and a consequence:

At the conclusion of the review, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will delete or return all copies of the full image and video files from all Devices. Also at the conclusion of the review, the FBI will lock off access to the full data extractions of all Devices. This process will ensure that the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office will only be able to review, access, and use the portions of the Devices identified as responsive to the Warrant for further investigation and prosecution.³

The emphasis on “only” is the document’s own, set in bold and underlined on the sheet.³

And the sentence immediately after it sets the limit:

If it is determined that there is a need to review items not identified as responsive, the FBI will need to seek a new warrant to review the full contents of any of the Devices.³

⚠ No document read for this page records whether the deletion, the return or the lock-off ever took place. The protocol is a statement of intent by the office, and this page reports it as that.

The name on the door

The memorandum ends by telling reviewers who to ask. It names her, personally, as the contact of record, and the sentence is worth reading twice:

Reviewers are encouraged to contact AUSA Comey at any time and with any questions or concerns, no matter how small.³

⚠ Her direct telephone number and e-mail address are redacted on every copy read, and nothing about them appears here.

The following day she wrote to the FBI team dividing the work, asking that “in the first instance” they review ten named devices and noting that “we may reassign some devices between the teams.”⁵ ⚠ She did not allocate those devices to individual agents. That was done two days later by an FBI special agent, and a page that credited the allocation to her would be attributing a case agent’s work to the prosecutor.⁵

The subpoenas

Nine custodian certifications in the release recite grand jury subpoenas she signed, each in the same words: “I am in receipt of a Grand Jury Subpoena, dated ▮, and signed by Assistant United States Attorney Maurene Comey, requesting specified records of the business named below.”⁴

The dates are 16 August, 3 September and 11 December 2019, and the businesses are named on every one that was completed: the credit bureau Experian, and American Express.⁴

⚠ Six of the nine are executed. Three are blank template forms that were never filled in. On those three the completion fields are empty ruled lines, not redactions. Nothing was withheld; nothing was ever written.⁴ This page counts six certifications by recipients, not nine.

The laptop at the jail

One exchange shows the shape of the pre-trial work. On 14 October 2020 she wrote to an FBI special agent and a detective, copying her two co-authors, about an arrangement Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers had made with the Metropolitan Detention Center for Maxwell to review photographs on a secure laptop:

They are asking, though, for Maxwell to be permitted to review the laptop alone because they do not have an attorney available at that time to be present for the review. Their position is that Maxwell will be in a jail setting completely alone, so she cannot copy the photographs. Would you please let me know whether the FBI would permit Maxwell to review the laptop alone in a visitor room at the MDC? If not, we will need to be able to explain to Judge Nathan why that is not acceptable.⁶

She is asking the FBI to decide, and telling them the office will have to justify a refusal to the trial judge. She adds that she had tried telephoning both of them and got no answer.⁶

The answer came the next morning, and it is a refusal in the form of an accommodation:

We can make Friday work. We have two agents that will be able to be there. I can give you a call a little later to discuss more.⁶

⚠ The person who wrote that reply cannot be identified: the sender, the copy line, the salutation and the sign-off are all redacted on the only copy read.⁶

Identification, and a name-form finding that generalises

Floor 718 on the exact phrase; union 951 across forms. Both are floors.

form	documents	outside the base set
"Maurene Comey"	718	base
Maurene (forename alone)	926	208
"Ms Comey"	98	21
"Comey, Maurene"	28	10
"Maureen Comey" (misspelled)	26	9
"Maurene R Comey"	18	10
"AUSA Comey"	10	3

⚠ THE VOLUME BARELY MOVES AND THE REACH FAILURE IS SEVERE. The full name finds the filings she is listed on; her forename finds the e-mails she wrote. Only three documents in the release carry an e-mail header in the form From: Comey, Maurene, and two of those three lie outside the 718. 108 documents carry her first-person sign-off, her forename over an Assistant United States Attorney block, and the exact-phrase search finds only 76 of them.¹

⚠ THE BARE SURNAME WAS NOT USED AND MUST NOT BE. Comey returns 1,090 documents. Of those, 768 carry one of her forms, 172 carry explicit markers of a different and far more famous Comey, and 150 are the bare surname with no marker either way and cannot be attributed at all. Up to 29.5% of that set is not her, and the contamination is concentrated in news briefings that sit in the same identifier ranges as her e-mail.²

---

Footnotes

1. Counts on the authoritative pages_fts route, scoped text_content, each form run as an exact phrase, count(distinct efta_number), identifier sets compared by set difference against the "Maurene Comey" base. Her middle initial is R, read from a filed appearance block; a search on a different initial returned zero. ⚠ The tokeniser splits on . and ,, so "Comey, Maurene" and "Comey Maurene" are one query, and an e-mail handle in the form forename.surname collapses to the plain phrase; none of these is treated here as an independent corroborating form. ↩ ↩²

2. Same route. Base 718; union 951; intersection with Epstein 419; intersection with "Ghislaine Maxwell" 635. Surname partition: 1,090 total = 768 her forms + 172 explicit other-Comey + 150 unattributable. The 150 are recorded as unattributable rather than split, because a count there would be a guess. ↩ ↩²

3. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01653601 pp. 1-3, a memorandum of 19 October 2020 addressed to the case file, from Maurene Comey, Alison Moe and Lara Pomerantz. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi, with checks at 600. She is an author and not a recipient: the document is addressed to the file and carries no distribution list. ⚠ Two further copies of this memorandum exist in the release and neither supports the sentences quoted here, because they redact the authors’ names — one as three separate bars and the other as a single continuous bar. This copy is cited because it is the one that carries the attribution. ⚠ The contact details in the closing paragraph are redacted on every copy read, and the page reproduces nothing of them. The memorandum’s own typographical errors are left as printed and are not repaired. ⚠ A thin rule beneath one line of page 3 is an artefact of the redaction layer rather than a bar; every character beneath it is legible, and it is why the text layer of every copy drops a letter from the word “protocol”. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

4. Nine custodian certifications, all nine rendered and read at the image at 400 dpi: https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01265457 p. 1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01265476 p. 1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01654850 p. 4, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01654843 p. 4, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01265479 p. 1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01307703 p. 1 are executed; https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01654122 p. 4, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01654126 p. 4 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01682426 p. 8 are blank templates. ⚠ The bar in the quoted recital stands for the subpoena date, which differs between documents. It is not a redaction, and that is stated because a bar in a quotation on this wiki otherwise means one. ⚠ The text layer of the handwritten certifications is unusable, rendering the same business name three different ways, none of them the name; the businesses were read at the image. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01653487 pp. 2-3, her e-mail of 19 October 2020 asking that the FBI team review ten listed devices, and a later e-mail in the same document from an FBI special agent dividing those devices among named personnel two days afterwards. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi, the count of ten confirmed by counting the entries. ⚠ The allocation to individuals is the special agent’s and not hers, and the sheet’s topmost date belongs to the covering message rather than to her e-mail. ↩ ↩²

6. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00152907 p. 1, her e-mail of 14 October 2020, and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00152662 p. 1, the reply of the following morning. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. Every e-mail address on both sheets is redacted while the names are clear, and the reply’s sender is redacted throughout, so the responder is not identified here. ⚠ No local clock time is given for either message: the two sheets stamp the same e-mail in two different zones, neither of them New York. The quoted passage is the whole of the substantive request; nothing has been cut from its middle. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴