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.
Maureen ComeyU.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 adm
