Main: Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey at Harvard University's Institute of Politics' JFK Jr. Forum in Cambridge, Mass., Monday, Feb. 24, 2020 (AP Photo/Charles Krupa). Left inset: Donald Trump, President of the United States, attends a press conference at the NATO Summit at the Presidential Complex in Ankara, Turkiye, on July 8, 2026 (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via AP). Right inset: Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey arrives at Federal Court for the Sean "Diddy" Combs trial, on Monday, May 19, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey).
A New York judge ordered the reinstatement of fired federal prosecutor Maurene Comey with back pay, finding that the daughter of ex-FBI Director James Comey was "terminated in violation of the constitutional separation of powers and federal law."
The veteran Southern District of New York prosecutor who helped put Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell behind bars was unlawfully fired in July 2025, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled Monday in a lengthy decision.
Comey's firing violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), violated her Fifth Amendment "due process and statutory rights," and was "not authorized by" the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA), the Barack Obama-appointed jurist concluded, rejecting the DOJ's citations of the Supreme Court's presidential immunity decision in Trump v. United States and the firing powers decision in Trump v. Slaughter.
"Defendants' contention that recent Supreme Court decisions have fatally undermined that precedent is not one that this Court, as a lower court, may accept. It is also without merit. Indeed, to accept Defendants' argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation's constitutional system," Furman said, rejecting the DOJ's "sweeping and unprecedented theory of executive authority."
"Slaughter, at least, was a case about the President's removal power; Trump v. United States, of course, was not," the judge observed. "Instead, it was a case about presidential immunity from criminal prosecution."
"That said," he added, "there is language in Trump v. United States that, taken out of context and read broadly (as Defendants do), could call Perkins and its progeny into question."
Though he called the DOJ's immunity decision argument "at least colorable," Furman noted that nowhere in that opinion did the justices "suggest, let alone hold, that it was overruling two centuries of jurisprudence regarding Congress's authority to restrict the removal of inferior officers" like Comey.
"To the contrary, when the Court referred to the President's 'unrestricted power of removal' — as it did repeatedly — it made clear that it was referring specifically to the President's power to remove principal officers, such as the Attorney General himself," the ruling said, not letting "stray language" from the immunity decision carry the day.
Furman stated that the Trump DOJ's interpretation that Congress "may not regulate the removal of an Executive Branch official at the behest of the President himself and may not interfere directly with investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking" has "no relevance to the propriety of Comey's removal in this case."
As a result, he granted Maurene Comey "retroactive reinstatement and backpay effective from the date of her termination through December 20, 2025[.]"