A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration broke the law when it abruptly fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, from her job as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman found that the July 2025 firing violated the Constitution’s separation of powers, Comey’s Fifth Amendment due process rights, and the federal civil service law that protects career employees. He ordered her retroactively reinstated with back pay.
Fired by email from Washington
Comey served nearly ten years as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, where she worked on some of the country’s highest-profile cases, including the prosecutions of Sean “Diddy” Combs, former Sen. Bob Menendez, Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. In his opinion, Furman noted she “consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike.”
On July 16, 2025, she received an email from Justice Department officials in Washington terminating her employment “pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution.” Comey has said the only explanation her boss gave her was that the decision “came from Washington.” The department later said in a court filing that she was removed at the direction of then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Comey sued in September 2025, alleging she was fired with “no legitimate explanation” after almost a decade of service, and only because of President Donald Trump’s “well-known and longstanding vendetta against James Comey, whom he fired as FBI Director in 2017.”
“Sweeping and unprecedented”
The administration argued that the attorney general could fire a career prosecutor at will, for no reason at all, and that Congress has no power to limit that authority. Furman rejected that position outright.
“Yes, the Attorney General is authorized by law to remove an AUSA,” he wrote. “But the Attorney General (and anyone to whom the Attorney General delegates that authority) is also limited by law, namely the CSRA, to do so only in a particular manner and only for certain reasons.” Comey’s removal, he found, “indisputably violated” those limits.
Furman called the department’s argument a “sweeping and unprecedented theory of executive authority” that “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.” Accepting it, he wrote, “would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.”
The judge also pointed to the broader pattern. “Defendants invented a new and expansive theory of executive power,” he wrote. “And they have also utilized that theory to remove other Executive Branch employees who have long held protections from removal.” The administration has fired a number of career prosecutors and FBI employees, particularly people who worked on past investigations of Trump or on the January 6 Capitol attack.
What the ruling means for Comey
Comey took a private-sector job in December 2025 and won’t be returning to the Justice Department. The ruling reinstates her retroactively from the date of her firing through December 20, 2025, provides back pay and restores benefits for that period, and orders her personnel file updated to reflect that she resigned rather than being fired.
“This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law,” her attorneys said in a statement, calling it a “hard-earned victory” that “belongs to Ms. Comey, to all civil servants, and to all fighting for the rule of law.”
DOJ vows to appeal
A Justice Department spokesperson said the department “disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course.”
Meanwhile, the administration is still pursuing a federal criminal case against James Comey over a photo of seashells it claims amounted to a threat against Trump. That case has been delayed until at least early 2027 while a judge weighs whether to dismiss it. Comey’s legal team argues the prosecution is a product of Trump’s retribution campaign.