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A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration unlawfully fired Maurene Comey, a veteran Manhattan federal prosecutor, and ordered her retroactive reinstatement with back pay, in a sharp rebuke of the Justice Department's claim that it could dismiss career prosecutors at will.
US District Judge Jesse Furman, of the Southern District of New York, held in a 55-page order that Comey's July 2025 dismissal violated the Civil Service Reform Act, the federal law that sets limits on how career civil servants can be removed. "Congress granted the Attorney General power to remove Comey," Furman wrote. "Congress imposed limits on that power – limits that, even Defendants concede, were violated in Comey's case."
Furman rejected the Justice Department's argument that the Constitution allowed the attorney general to remove an assistant US attorney "at will" and without cause. "Comey's removal was not authorized by any statute; to the contrary, it violated the CSRA," he wrote, adding that accepting the government's position "would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation's constitutional system."
The practical effect of the ruling is narrower than a return to the prosecutor's desk. Comey has since taken another job, so Furman's order reinstates her retroactively and provides back pay through December 20, 2025, when she started that new role, along with restored pension benefits for that period. It also orders her personnel file to be corrected to reflect that she resigned rather than was fired.
Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, had served nearly a decade as an assistant US attorney in Manhattan, one of the Justice Department's most prominent offices. Her cases included the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, hip-hop mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, and former Senator Robert Menendez. She was fired on July 16, 2025, by an email that said she was being removed from federal service effective immediately "pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution," with no reason given.
When she asked for an explanation, she was told only that the decision "came from Washington," according to her lawsuit. She sued in September 2025, arguing that she was dismissed because of her father, whom President Donald Trump fired as FBI director in 2017, or because of her perceived political beliefs, or both. The Justice Department later told the court that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi had directed the removal.
The ruling does not settle every question in the case, and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The decision can be appealed, and the administration had previously argued in court that recent Supreme Court decisions expanded the president's power to remove federal officials. But for now, Furman's order stands as a significant judicial check on the administration's removals of career Justice Department lawyers, a series of firings that has drawn alarm from former prosecutors and civil-service advocates.
Comey's lawyers have argued that no president can fire a career federal employee based solely on her last name. Furman's ruling agrees on the narrow, statutory ground: whatever the president's removal power, Congress set rules for removing assistant US attorneys, and the government did not follow them.
Sources: Reuters, NBC News, The Hill, Bloomberg Law