Judge blocks Trump administration’s unlawful purge of federal prosecutor Maurene Comey
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A federal judge found that the Trump administration trampled constitutional and statutory safeguards when it fired assistant U.S. attorney Maurene Comey, ordering her reinstatement and back pay.
A Manhattan federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration’s termination of Maurene Comey, an assistant U.S. attorney, was unlawful. Judge Jesse M. Furman said the firing violated the constitutional separation of powers, the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment due-process clause, and ordered Comey’s retroactive reinstatement and back pay through Dec. 20 to make up for the unlawful termination.
"To accept Defendants’ argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system," Furman wrote, flatly rejecting the government’s attempt to claim sweeping power to remove federal prosecutors at will.
Comey, who served as a federal prosecutor for a decade and worked on high-profile cases including the prosecutions of Sean "Diddy" Combs, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, was dismissed in July 2025. She sued the Justice Department, arguing that the termination violated the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment and the separation of powers because of her familial connection to former FBI director James Comey.
The Justice Department issued a brief statement saying it disagrees with the decision and will appeal.
"This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law," said Comey’s attorneys in a statement.
The ruling carries wider consequences for the administration’s pattern of removing career federal employees, which the judge said clashes with nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.