Judge Rules Maurene Comey Was Unlawfully Fired as a Federal Prosecutor and Orders Reinstatement

Maurene Comey was fired unlawfully as an assistant U.S. attorney in July 2025, Judge Jesse M. Furman ruled in Manhattan on Monday 26 October, granting her retroactive reinstatement and back pay in a 55-page opinion and order.

Comey, the daughter of the former FBI director James B. Comey, spent nearly ten years as a prosecutor in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. On 16 July 2025 she received an email terminating her employment “[p]ursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States.” The government’s defence rested on the first half of that phrase. The judge decided the case on the second.

What did the court decide?

That a statute giving the Attorney General power to remove a prosecutor does not let the Attorney General remove one at will. Section 542(b) of Title 28 says that “[e]ach assistant United States attorney is subject to removal by the Attorney General.” The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, known as the CSRA, the law that governs discipline of most federal employees, says an employee in Comey’s position may be removed “only for such cause as will promote the efficiency of the service,” and only after notice and a chance to respond. Furman held that both statutes apply at once: the first says who may act, the second says how. “Yes, the Attorney General is authorized by law to remove an AUSA,” he wrote. “But the Attorney General ... is also limited by law, namely the CSRA, to do so only in a particular manner and only for certain reasons.”

The facts on that question were not in dispute. According to the opinion, the government admitted in its answer that Comey received no notice or reason before the termination, and that her removal “was not ‘for cause’ and was not based on her performance.” Her appraisals rated her “Outstanding” every year from 2019 through 2024, the opinion records, and the government’s lawyer conceded at argument that she “had outstanding service as an AUSA.” The court also noted that the executive branch had treated prosecutors as covered by the civil service protections from at least 1983 until this administration, and that the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears federal employees’ appeals, reached the same reading in a 2002 decision, Hamlett v. Department of Justice.

Why does Article II not settle it?

Because the Constitution itself lets Congress regulate the removal of inferior officers. The government argued that federal prosecutors exercise powers the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States called “conclusive and preclusive,” so Congress may not limit their removal at all. Furman wrote that the argument “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent,” running from United States v. Perkins in 1886 through Myers v. United States and Morrison v. Olson, which hold that when Congress vests an inferior officer’s appointment in a department head, it may also limit that officer’s removal. Assistant U.S. attorneys are either employees or inferior officers, “but certainly not principal officers,” the opinion says, and the Attorney General appoints them under 28 U.S.C. § 542(a).

The judge read the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, which overruled Humphrey’s Executor, as a holding about principal officers only. The Court in that case, he noted, expressly declined to “determine the fate of officials not before [it],” and Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence described the civil service sections as affording “rank-and-file agency employees considerable protection against removal” without questioning them. The removal power has reached the justices in other forms this year, in their refusal to hear Gwynne Wilcox’s challenge to her firing from the labour board and in the one-vote order that kept Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve.

What does the record show about who decided?

Less than it might. The termination memorandum was signed by the director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, and neither it nor the personnel form that followed mentioned the Attorney General, Section 542 or the CSRA. Jay Clayton, then the interim U.S. attorney, told Comey that the decision “came from Washington,” a statement the government admits. The government first said in its answer, filed on 26 May 2026, that then-Attorney General Pamela Bondi directed the removal, and attached a memorandum from Todd Blanche, then Acting Attorney General, ratifying it. Because Section 542(b) gave Bondi no power to fire Comey without cause, the court held, it gave Blanche no power to ratify the firing afterward, a point the government conceded at argument.

The choice of authority also brought the case to a federal court rather than the Merit Systems Protection Board. The government first argued that Comey had to use the CSRA’s own review scheme. In April the court disagreed, holding that her case fell outside that scheme “because she was fired pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, not pursuant to the CSRA itself.” The same three words are being litigated in Seattle, where Section 541(c) makes each U.S. attorney “subject to removal by the President” and a judge restored the prosecutor the administration fired within an hour of his swearing-in; that case is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

What did she win, and what did she not?

Less than “reinstated” suggests. The table below is this publication’s timeline, drawn from the opinion and the court docket.

By this publication’s arithmetic, the reinstatement covers 157 days, from 16 July to 20 December 2025, and the ruling came 467 days after the firing. Comey has taken another job and no longer seeks to return, the opinion says, so the reinstatement changes her personnel record and pay rather than returning her to the office. The court declared that the government violated the separation of powers, the Administrative Procedure Act and her due process and statutory rights. It ruled against her on an ultra vires count, dismissed four others, and left the amount of back pay and any fees for later. It reserved judgment on her First Amendment claim, the one that alleges she was fired because of her father, and ordered her to explain by 9 November why it should not be dismissed as unnecessary now that she has the relief it would bring.

Her lawyers said in a statement, reported by the Guardian, that the decision “reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances.” The Justice Department did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment, and no notice of appeal appears on the docket as of Monday. The court found the firing unlawful without deciding why it happened.