Judge Rules Trump Justice Department Unlawfully Fired Prosecutor Maurene Comey

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled Monday that the Justice Department broke the law when it fired Maurene Comey, a veteran federal prosecutor and the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, rejecting the Trump administration's argument that the Constitution gives the president unchecked authority to remove career prosecutors at will.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, in a 55-page opinion and order issued in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York's home court, granted Comey judgment on the central counts of her lawsuit and ordered her retroactively reinstated with back pay. The ruling is a direct rebuke of a legal theory the administration has used to justify dismissing career Justice Department employees without cause.

What the court found

Comey, who spent nearly a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, was dismissed on July 16, 2025, in a terse email from department headquarters that cited only "Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States." No further explanation was given. She sued two months later, alleging the real reason was her father's standing as a longtime adversary of President Trump, or her perceived political affiliation, or both.

The administration told the court that then-Attorney General Pamela Bondi had directed the firing and that a successor, Todd Blanche, later ratified it. Government lawyers argued that a statute allowing the attorney general to remove assistant U.S. attorneys, combined with Article II's vesting of executive power in the president, left Congress no room to limit when or why career prosecutors could be dismissed. They leaned in part on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Trump v. Slaughter, which allowed the president to remove members of independent federal commissions without cause.

Furman rejected that reasoning as an extension of Slaughter well beyond what the Supreme Court actually decided. He held that the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 lawfully limits the removal of assistant U.S. attorneys to cases involving cause, and that the administration's own court filings conceded Comey's dismissal met none of those conditions.

"To accept Defendants' argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation's constitutional system," Furman wrote.

The numbers in the ruling

• Comey's back pay runs from her July 16, 2025 termination through December 20, 2025, when she took a job at the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler.
• She received "Outstanding" performance ratings in every annual review from 2019 through 2024, a fact the government did not dispute in court filings.
• She had served just under ten years as an assistant U.S. attorney before her firing.
• The case, Comey v. U.S. Department of Justice, No. 25-CV-7625, was filed September 15, 2025, and Furman's ruling came thirteen months later.

Background: a career ended by memo

Before her firing, Comey worked on some of the Southern District's highest-profile prosecutions, including the sex-trafficking cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the racketeering trial of Sean "Diddy" Combs, and the bribery case against former Sen. Robert Menendez. None of those cases is at issue in the ruling, but they underscore the seniority and visibility of the position she lost.

Her dismissal fits a pattern the administration has followed with other career Justice Department lawyers and FBI personnel seen as connected to investigations of Trump or the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack. Furman's opinion traces the legal backdrop to the Civil Service Act of 1883, enacted after the assassination of President James Garfield by a disappointed office-seeker, through the 1978 overhaul that created the modern framework protecting most federal employees from being fired for cause unrelated to job performance.

The case took more than a year to reach Monday's merits ruling. The government initially struggled to find a U.S. attorney's office willing to defend the firing in court, and several offices declined the assignment before the Northern District of New York stepped in. In April, Furman rejected a government bid to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds, ruling that because Comey's termination memo invoked Article II rather than ordinary civil service law, her claims belonged in federal court rather than before the Merit Systems Protection Board, the administrative body that normally hears federal employment disputes. That earlier ruling allowed the case to proceed to Monday's decision on the merits, which the court reached on cross-motions for judgment on the pleadings rather than at trial.

Reaction and what comes next

Comey's attorneys called the ruling a win for "all civil servants, and all fighting for the rule of law." A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency "disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course," a move expected to send the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Furman did not resolve every claim in Comey's lawsuit. He reserved judgment on her First Amendment retaliation claim, ordering supplemental briefing due November 9, and left the exact dollar amount of back pay and the question of attorneys' fees for later proceedings. Because Comey has since taken another job and is not seeking actual return to the department, the practical effect of Monday's order is financial and reputational rather than a return to the courtroom. The judge also stayed further discovery in the case, saying his ruling on the legal questions made it largely unnecessary.

The decision does not resolve the broader constitutional question for federal employees generally, but it sets down a marker in the Southern District of New York just as the administration presses an expansive view of presidential removal power in other personnel disputes across the government. Furman was careful to distinguish Comey's case from the Supreme Court's Slaughter ruling, noting that assistant U.S. attorneys, unlike commissioners of independent agencies, report up a chain of command to a principal officer who is removable by the president at will — a structure the Supreme Court's own removal-power precedents have long treated as constitutionally sufficient. Whether that distinction survives on appeal will likely depend on how the Second Circuit, and potentially the Supreme Court, reads the reach of its own recent rulings on executive power.