A federal judge ruled Monday that the Justice Department unlawfully fired Maurene Comey, the former Manhattan federal prosecutor who worked on the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases and the daughter of ex-FBI Director James Comey, and ordered her reinstated retroactively with back pay.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, in a 55-page decision, found that her removal violated the Civil Service Reform Act and the constitutional separation of powers, CBS News reported. The back pay runs from her July 2025 firing through Dec. 20, 2025, when she accepted a different job.

Furman rejected the government's central argument that the attorney general can fire a career prosecutor at will. He wrote that the administration was trying to "upend" long-settled case law allowing Congress to regulate the removal of inferior officers, called the Justice Department's position a "sweeping and unprecedented theory of executive authority," and warned that accepting it would "unsettle the very equilibrium" of the constitutional system.

He also refused to let a later sign-off cure the firing. The administration said in May that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi "directed" the removal and that her successor, Todd Blanche, "ratified" it. Furman held that the ratification did not save it.

The government's own record undercut it. In court, DOJ admitted Comey had "outstanding" performance ratings from 2019 through 2024. According to the Daily Beast, Furman said the reasoning for the firing "borders on frivolous," and that he will issue a declaration that DOJ violated the separation of powers, the Civil Service Reform Act, the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause.

Nobody ever told her why. Comey said she was "summarily fired via memo" from DOJ headquarters in Washington; the letter cited Article II of the Constitution and said her employment was "hereby terminated." Jay Clayton, then the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told her, "All I can say is it came from Washington. I can't tell you anything else," per the Daily Beast.

The government had also argued that she had to take her claims to the Merit Systems Protection Board. Furman rejected that because the firing rested on Article II rather than on a civil service law, which put the case in federal court. He made the same call in April, when he kept the lawsuit in his courtroom and left the merits for later.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the department "disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course." Comey's lawyers called the ruling a "hard-earned victory" for her and for civil servants, saying it reaffirms that "the President is not above the law."

Comey had been a federal prosecutor in Manhattan since 2015. Besides Epstein and Maxwell, she handled cases against Sean "Diddy" Combs and former Sen. Robert Menendez. Her firing came in July 2025, and we reported it then.

The suit alleges she was fired because of her father or her perceived politics. James Comey, a Trump critic, has been indicted twice in the second Trump term. One case, charging him with lying to Congress, was thrown out after a judge ruled the indictment was illegally obtained. In the other, he is charged over a deleted Instagram post of seashells arranged as "86 47," and his lawyers have moved to dismiss, arguing it is protected political speech and a vindictive prosecution. He denies wrongdoing.

The Justice Department says it will appeal, so the reinstatement may not stick. In court it leaned on a statute letting the attorney general remove assistant U.S. attorneys, and on the Supreme Court's June decision allowing the president to fire members of certain independent agencies at will. Furman called those arguments "without merit," per the Daily Beast.

Maurene Comey becamse a US attorney in the Southern District of New York in 2015.

In 2019, when she was just 30-years-old, Comey became one of the lead prosecutors in the Jeffrey Epstein case before he was found dead in his jail cell in August 2019.

Two years later, she became one of three lead prosecutors in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's partner in crime and daughter of suspected Mossad operative Robert Maxwell. 

Before becoming a US attorney, Comey clerked for US District Court chief judge Loretta Preska of the SDNY - who notably oversaw a long-running defamation case filed by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell.

Comey was also involved in the case of Nicholas Tartaglione, a former NYPD officer who was convicted of killing four men in 2016, and who was briefly Epstein's cellmate in the Manhattan Metro Correctional Center. Tartaglione claims to have helped Epstein after 'finding him unconscious' (and totally not trying to kill him) prior to Epstein's actual death.

In 2016, Tartaglione suspected a man named Martin Luna had stolen money from him - for which "Tartaglione tortured Martin and then forced one of Martin’s nephews to watch as he strangled him to death with a zip-tie," according to a statement by the US Attorney's Office.

Two days after Epstein's death, NY Times reporter James B Stewart, who had spent 90 minutes with Epstein a year prior, wrote "The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.

And so, whether this is just a case of 'it's a small world' or something a little (or a lot) less innocent, James Comey's daughter is now involved in a second case where high-profile celebrities and politicians may have been secretly filmed engaging in sexual activity with minors.

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