NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration illegally fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of ex-FBI Director and Trump critic James Comey, as a Justice Department prosecutor, a judge ruled Monday in a sharp rebuke of the administration’s authority to terminate career federal employees it dislikes.
The ruling is tailored to Maurene Comey but its import stretches beyond her case, repudiating the claim of President Donald Trump’s administration that the Constitution permits such firings for any reason. Administration officials have cited that belief repeatedly in a sweeping purge of the federal workforce.
Comey, an assistant U.S. attorney for a decade, was fired in July 2025 despite consistently receiving “the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike," Judge Jesse M. Furman found.
The judge said her firing violated laws passed by Congress that were intended to abolish the spoils system, under which newly elected presidents regularly purged government workers and replaced them with loyalists.
Furman's decision didn't address the validity of Comey's claim that she was fired because she is the daughter of James Comey, whom Trump has long viewed as an enemy.
Trump fired James Comey as FBI director in May 2017 as the bureau was investigating ties between Russia and the Republican’s successful 2016 campaign for the White House. Trump in the years since has repeatedly called for Comey to be jailed, and his Justice Department has worked with mixed success to make that happen.
Hours after Furman's ruling Monday, unsealed court filings showed that the Justice Department had quietly brought another criminal case against James Comey, accusing him of leaking classified information.
Furman, who was nominated to the bench in 2011 by then-Democratic President Barack Obama, granted Maurene Comey retroactive reinstatement and back pay from the date of her firing through Dec. 20, 2025, when she began a new, private-sector job.
In a statement, the Justice Department said it disagreed with this decision and would appeal.
Comey’s lawyers, Ellen Blain, Nicole Gueron, Deepa Vanamali and Margaret Donovan, lauded the ruling.
“This hard-earned victory belongs to Ms. Comey, to all civil servants, and to all fighting for the rule of law,” they said in a statement. “This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law.”
Comey was fired two weeks after leading the prosecution of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, which ended in a conviction on prostitution-related charges but an acquittal on others. She also worked on the sex trafficking prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who killed himself in jail a month after his arrest in 2019, and Epstein’s former girlfriend and longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
The Justice Department during the Trump administration has fired scores of career employees, including prosecutors and FBI agents, who participated in investigations of Trump or who were perceived as opposed to the administration’s agenda. Some of those firings have also resulted in federal lawsuits.
The firing of Maurene Comey was seen as particularly personal, given her father’s longtime adversarial relationship with Trump.
An earlier criminal case accusing James Comey of having lied to Congress in 2020 was dismissed by a judge who concluded that the prosecutor who filed the charges was illegally appointed. A separate pending indictment charges the former FBI director with threatening Trump through an Instagram photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47,” a case he has sought to dismiss that some legal experts have greeted with skepticism.
In his ruling on Maurene Comey's termination, Furman said the Justice Department's claim that Congress is barred from regulating the removal of federal prosecutors “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.”
Furman added: “Indeed, to accept Defendants’ argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.”
He didn't rule on Comey’s claim that her firing violated her free speech rights, though he said he was inclined to dismiss it because she is now in private practice and no longer seeks reinstatement to her old job.
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Tucker and Durkin reported from Washington.
