Career Prosecutors Are Not the President’s Personal Staff

Maurene Comey spent about a decade as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. She worked on the cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, against the music mogul Sean Combs and against former Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat. Then, in July 2025, she was fired by a memo from Washington that gave no reason.

On Monday, District Judge Jesse Furman ruled that the firing was unlawful and ordered her reinstated with back pay. His 55-page decision should be read well beyond the Justice Department, because the government’s defense would have reached almost every career employee in the executive branch.

The administration did not argue that Ms. Comey had done anything wrong. It argued that it did not need a reason at all. Its lawyers told the court that the Constitution gives the executive branch unlimited power to remove federal prosecutors at will, and that Congress has no authority to restrict it. Judge Furman called that theory sweeping and unprecedented, and noted that the department had conceded the limits Congress wrote into law were not followed in her case.

Ms. Comey has argued that the real reason was obvious: she is the daughter of James Comey, the former FBI director whom President Trump fired in 2017 and has attacked ever since. Judge Furman’s ruling, as NBC News and CBS News described it, rested on civil service law and the separation of powers. But the pattern is hard to ignore, and the department’s refusal to offer any explanation only invites the inference.

This matters for reasons that have nothing to do with one family. The civil service exists so that the people who prosecute crimes, inspect food, process benefits and guard secrets keep their jobs based on their work, not their politics or their relatives. A prosecutor who knows she can be removed on a whim for displeasing the White House is a prosecutor under pressure to bend. Citizens on the other side of her cases, whether powerful or ordinary, deserve better than that.

The administration’s position is not frivolous, and it deserves a fair hearing on appeal. The Supreme Court has expanded presidential removal power in recent years, and there is a legitimate democratic argument that voters elect a president to run the executive branch, including its lawyers, and that unelected officials should answer to someone the public can hold accountable.

But accountability runs through rules, not around them. Congress has the authority to set the terms on which government employees are hired and fired, and it has written such limits into law. A president who disagrees can ask Congress to change the law. What he cannot do, as Judge Furman put it, is adopt a theory that would unsettle the balance the Constitution established.

The Justice Department says it will appeal. It should think hard before asking higher courts to declare that every career prosecutor in the country serves at the pleasure of the president. A justice system that works that way would not be more accountable. It would simply be more frightened.