One Memo, No Reason Given: Judge Rules Maurene Comey Was Fired Unlawfully

In July 2025, a decade-long career in the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan ended with a single paragraph sent from the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington. Maurene Comey later told her colleagues in a farewell letter that she had been “summarily fired via memo,” and that nobody had given her a reason. The memo did not give one either. It cited a constitution and a body of law, and that was all:

“Pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States, your employment with the Department of Justice is hereby terminated, and you are removed from federal service effective immediately.”

On Monday, October 26, 2026, U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman answered that paragraph with 55 pages. The firing, he ruled, broke the law. It violated the constitutional separation of powers, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the Administrative Procedure Act, and Comey’s Fifth Amendment due process and statutory rights, as Jacob Rosen and Melissa Quinn reported for CBS News.

The daughter

Her name was the problem, or so she argued. Comey had been a federal prosecutor in Manhattan since 2015. She worked the cases that fill front pages: Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sean “Diddy” Combs, the former Democratic senator Robert Menendez. In court filings, the Justice Department admitted she had been rated “outstanding” in every performance review from 2019 through 2024. The judge found she had consistently drawn “the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike,” according to the Associated Press account carried by CBC.

She is also the daughter of James Comey, the FBI director President Donald Trump fired in May 2017, while the bureau was investigating ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. In her lawsuit she said she had been dismissed because of who her father is, or because of the political views the administration assumed she held. For months it was not even clear who had signed off on her removal. Then, in May, the administration said that Pam Bondi, attorney general at the time, had “directed” it, and that her successor, Todd Blanche, had “ratified” it.

Here is a reflection, not a finding: a government that fires people without giving reasons still ends up leaving a record. A memo, a ratification, a performance file full of the word “outstanding.”

The theory

The government’s defence went much further than one prosecutor. Its lawyers argued that Article II of the Constitution gives the president unrestricted power to remove people, that federal prosecutors exercise his “conclusive and preclusive” authority, and that Congress has no business regulating their dismissal. They leaned partly on the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, which on June 29 overruled Humphrey’s Executor, the roughly 90-year-old precedent that had let Congress shield members of multimember independent agencies from being fired at will.

Furman called this a “sweeping and unprecedented theory of executive authority.” The claim that Congress cannot regulate the removal of prosecutors, he wrote, “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.” As CNBC reported, he noted that the Supreme Court “has not formally overruled any of those decisions,” and he drew the line plainly: the attorney general may remove an assistant U.S. attorney, but is “also limited by law, namely the CSRA, to do so only in a particular manner and only for certain reasons.”

Then came the sentence Comey’s lawyers would later quote back with obvious satisfaction: “Indeed, to accept Defendants’ argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.”

The government had already lost one round. It had tried to have the suit thrown out on the grounds that Comey belonged before the Merit Systems Protection Board, the body that hears federal employees’ appeals. Furman found that because the firing rested on Article II and not on a civil service statute, a federal court could hear the case. The administration had invoked the Constitution, so the dispute became a constitutional one.

What she is owed

Comey is not returning to the department. In February she became a partner at the New York law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. So the remedy works on paper. Furman granted her retroactive reinstatement, with back pay from her firing on July 16, 2025, through December 20, 2025, the date she accepted other work. The aim, he said, was to “make her whole” and spare her any adverse employment consequences from the “unlawful termination.” She had sought the back pay partly to qualify for retirement benefits. The ruling also restores pension benefits for that period and orders her personnel file changed to show that she resigned, according to reports of the decision.

He did not rule on her First Amendment claim, asking both sides for more argument. He said he was inclined to dismiss it as largely moot, since she is now in private practice and no longer wants her old job back.

The family file

The case belongs to a longer story. Trump has repeatedly called for James Comey to be jailed, and his Justice Department has indicted him twice. The first case, accusing him of lying to Congress in 2020, was dismissed after a judge concluded that the prosecutor who brought it had been illegally appointed. The second, still pending, charges him with threatening the president through an Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “86 47.” He has denied wrongdoing and is trying to have that case dismissed, and some legal experts have greeted it with skepticism. When the first indictment came, his son-in-law, Troy Edwards Jr., who is married to another of his daughters, resigned as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Others have been caught up in the same purge, though their names are less well known. The Justice Department has fired scores of career employees, prosecutors and FBI agents among them, who worked on investigations of Trump or were seen as insufficiently loyal to his agenda. Some have sued. Comey’s case, as Reuters reported via Al Jazeera, turned on whether the administration could remove so-called “inferior officers” without cause. Furman held that it had gone beyond the limits of executive authority.

Her lawyers, Ellen Blain, Nicole Gueron, Deepa Vanamali and Margaret Donovan, called the ruling a “hard-earned victory” for her and for all civil servants. “This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law,” they said. The department said in a post on X that it disagreed with a decision that, in its words, “obstructs President Trump’s constitutional authority to fire individuals who wield executive power on his behalf,” and that it would appeal “in due course.”