Judge Rules the Justice Department Unlawfully Fired Prosecutor Maurene Comey

A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Justice Department broke the law when it fired Maurene Comey, a longtime federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, and ordered her reinstated.

District Judge Jesse Furman found that the July 2025 dismissal violated the constitutional separation of powers and federal law protecting career government employees, according to NBC News and CBS News. He awarded Ms. Comey back pay from the date she was fired through Dec. 20, 2025, when she started a new job.

Ms. Comey had served as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York for about a decade. She worked on some of the office’s best-known cases, including those against Jeffrey Epstein, his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, the music mogul Sean Combs and former Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

She was dismissed by a memo from department headquarters with no explanation, she has said. In her lawsuit, filed in September 2025, she argued that the most likely reason was President Trump’s long-running hostility toward her father, whom Mr. Trump fired as FBI director in 2017. The department later said in court that the removal was directed by Pam Bondi, who was then attorney general.

The administration’s defense rested on a broad view of presidential power. Its lawyers argued that Article II of the Constitution lets the executive branch remove federal prosecutors at will, for any reason or none, and that Congress has no authority to limit that power. The government also argued that her claims belonged before the Merit Systems Protection Board, the agency that normally hears federal employee disputes, rather than in federal court.

Judge Furman rejected both arguments. Congress gave the attorney general the power to remove assistant United States attorneys but placed limits on it, he wrote, and the department conceded those limits were not followed in Ms. Comey’s case. Accepting the government’s theory, he wrote, would “unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.”

Ms. Comey’s lawyers called the decision a victory for her and for civil servants generally, saying it showed that the president is not above the law. A department spokesperson said the Justice Department disagrees with the ruling and will appeal in due course.

The administration’s position has real legal force behind it. The Supreme Court has expanded presidential removal power in recent years, and supporters of that approach argue that voters elect a president to run the executive branch, including the lawyers who carry out its prosecutions, and that career staff should not be insulated from that accountability.

The ruling sets up an appeal that could test how far that expanded removal power reaches into the ranks of career prosecutors, who have long been protected by civil service law. For now, Ms. Comey is entitled to her old job back.