The Justice Department broke the law when it summarily fired Maureen Comey, daughter of former FBI director and prominent anti-Trump figure James Comey, a federal judge ruled Monday, ordering that she be reinstated to her high-level prosecutor’s post and given back pay.
Judge Jesse Furman, an Obama appointee to the court in New York, said Ms. Comey had been a well-respected prosecutor before her firing in July 2025.
He said the Justice Department’s reasons for the firing rang thin and defied federal law, which only allowed firings of assistant U.S. attorneys in very limited instances, which Ms. Comey’s case didn’t meet.
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“Comey’s removal was not authorized by any statute,” the judge wrote.
The Justice Department had argued that even if her firing ran against the law, recent Supreme Court rulings have recognized expansive firing powers for a president.
Judge Furman said those cases didn’t deal directly with situations like Ms. Comey’s, but even if they did, the Justice Department read the Constitution wrong.
“Indeed, to accept defendants’ argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this nation’s constitutional system,” Judge Furman said.
In his ruling, he declared that Ms. Comey’s firing violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires that agency decision-making be fair and thoughtful; it trampled on the separation of powers by trying to circumvent the laws Congress wrote to govern the firing of civil employees; and it denied Ms. Comey her Fifth Amendment due process rights.
Mr. Comey, the father, was heading the FBI when President Trump took office the first time in 2017. He and the new president tussled over the FBI’s now-discredited probe of Trump-Russia collusion in the election.
Mr. Trump’s attorney general eventually fired Mr. Comey, citing poor decision-making in the previous year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of secret government emails.
Mr. Comey then emerged as a major opponent of Mr. Trump, authoring an anti-Trump book and exchanging barbs with the president on social media.
Earlier this year, Mr. Comey was charged with threatening the president’s life after he posted an image to social media of seashells displayed in the numbers “86 47.” The former of those is considered slang for getting rid of something, and Mr. Trump’s current administration is the 47th presidency.
Mr. Comey has said he didn’t know that context and deleted the post. He is battling the charges in court.
His daughter had been in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan since 2015, near the tail end of the Obama administration. She received accolades for her work on major cases ranging from Jeffrey Epstein to music artist Sean Combs to former Sen. Robert Menendez.
She was fired on July 16, 2025, in a brief memo from the Justice Department. A follow-up memo seemed to cite the president’s powers under Article II of the Constitution as the legal authority.
No “for cause” reason was cited.
Judge Furman said it appears that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi made the final decision, and that it was later “ratified” by then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who now holds the full job.
The judge said Ms. Comey’s firing seemed to be a response to pressure from particularly loud social media figures such as Laura Loomer.
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