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A federal judge on Monday ruled that the Justice Department illegally fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, from her job as a federal prosecutor in New York.
Comey was abruptly fired last July from her job as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, where she had served for roughly a decade and overseen some of the department’s most high-profile prosecutions – including cases against Jeffrey Epstein, Sean ‘Diddy‘ Combs, and former Senator Robert Menendez.
Comey sued to challenge her firing which she argued was unconstitutional and violated the separation of powers, the First Amendment, and her due process rights under the Fifth Amendment.
The federal judge overseeing her case largely agreed.
US District Judge Jesse M. Furman on Monday said Comey’s termination ‘was not authorized by any statute,’ despite the Trump administration’s arguments to the contrary, and ruled that it violated the Civil Service Reform Act, which limits the conditions by which federal workers can be removed from their jobs.
‘Indeed, to accept Defendants’ argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system,’ Furman said in the 55-page decision.
The judge further ordered Comey retroactively reinstated to her role, and ordered she be granted retroactive back pay beginning from the date of her firing until December 20, 2025, when she accepted a new job in the private sector.
Then-Assistant US Attorney Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, is seen outside federal court before the start of the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial in 2025
President Donald Trump shakes hands with then-FBI Director James Comey in 2017. Trump fired Comey the same year, well before the end of his ten-year tenure at the FBI
Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Donald Trump. A judge ruled Comey was illegally fired from the Justice Department,
It is unclear whether Comey plans to return to the Justice Department.
The ruling caps, for now, months of dispute between the Trump administration and Comey’s daughter, who argued last year she was fired due to the president’s longstanding adversarial relationship with her father, whom Trump fired as FBI director in 2017 – just several years into what would have been a ten-year tenure.
Comey said in her complaint last year ‘no plausible’ explanation exists for her firing from the Justice Department, barring the fact that her father is one of Trump’s biggest perceived political foes.
The judge, for his part, seemed to agree. He noted Comey had been ‘assigned some of the country’s highest profile cases’ during her nearly 10 years at DOJ and had ‘consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike.’
At the time of her lawsuit, Comey noted that Trump had posted, or re-posted more than 250 times about her father on social media, including posts ‘repeatedly’ describing him as the ‘worst’ FBI director in history.
Since taking office last January, Trump has brought two separate criminal cases against James Comey – the first, for allegedly making false statements to Congress, and the second, for allegedly threatening Trump by way of an Instagram photo he posted of seashells arranged to depict the numbers ’86 47.’
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
