The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling for Donald Trump is one of the precedents the Justice Department has relied on in defense of firing Maurene Comey as a federal prosecutor. That defense failed Monday, at least at the trial court level, when U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ordered retroactive reinstatement and back pay for the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey.

Maurene Comey had alleged that she was fired last year because of her relation to her father, whom Trump fired during his first presidential term and who then became a prominent Trump critic and a serial target of federal prosecution in Trump’s second term.

Backing her civil lawsuit on Monday, Furman said that neither the high court’s 2024 immunity ruling in Trump v. United States nor its ruling on presidential firing power last term in Trump v. Slaughter supported the government’s “sweeping and unprecedented theory of executive authority.”

The Obama-appointed judge in the Southern District of New York noted that unlike the Slaughter case, the immunity ruling wasn’t even about the president’s removal power but rather immunity from criminal prosecution. Still, the Department of Justice cited language from the immunity case to argue that assistant U.S. attorneys like Maurene Comey exercise “core executive power” under the Constitution and are therefore removable at will because, the government argued, a contrary rule would impede the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” power.

Furman conceded that the immunity ruling’s sweeping language made the government’s claim “at least colorable.” But he cautioned that the high court itself had said to read its opinions in context. In light of that admonition, Furman said there were “several good reasons” not to rely on the immunity ruling here.

“At most,” the judge wrote, “the language in Trump v. United States upon which [government] Defendants rely should be read to mean that Congress may not regulate the removal of an Executive Branch official at the behest of the President himself and may not interfere directly with investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking.”

Against that backdrop, Furman wrote, the immunity case is irrelevant to this one, because government officials insisted that Comey’s firing wasn’t ordered by Trump. “To the contrary,” the judge wrote, “they assert that it was the then-Attorney General [Pam Bondi] who ‘authorized and directed’ Comey’s removal.”

The judge concluded that he had to reject what he deemed the government’s bid to upend longstanding limits on executive firing power that are still intact even after recent Supreme Court rulings. He said that endorsing the DOJ’s argument would disrupt the constitutional order and “risk a return to the spoils system that Congress has sought to end since the nineteenth century.”

He said the government violated the separation of powers, federal law and the plaintiff’s Fifth Amendment due process and statutory rights.

The DOJ said it would appeal Furman’s ruling “in due course.” If the case reaches the justices, then the GOP-appointed court majority that issued the immunity and Slaughter rulings can decide whether and how they apply here.

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Attorney General Todd Blanche said on social media over the weekend that the Department of Justice does not seek “to stop the certification of Alaska’s election.”

The Department of Justice does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska's election. This litigation seeks to ensure that after Alaskans cast their ballots, they are preserved in a manner so that only Alaska's governing officials have the…

— Attorney General Todd Blanche (@AGToddBlanche) October 24, 2026

That statement is tough to square with the lawsuit the DOJ filed days earlier against Alaska’s election officials, as the department seeks to intervene there and in California amid GOP fears of losing congressional control in next week’s midterm elections.

The federal government’s Alaska complaint stems from its concern that Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan could lose a close race to Democratic challenger Mary Peltola due to the presence of a candidate on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan, who the DOJ said is running “with the intention of misleading supporters of Senator Sullivan into voting for him.”

But even if that claim about the other Sullivan’s intention is true, the legal question is: What can a federal court do for the federal government about it?

In the part of its complaint in which the DOJ makes its case for having legal standing to bring the suit, it said that its asserted legal injuries would be solved by a court order “declaring a certification of an election result prejudiced by Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot unlawful and enjoining defendants [Alaska officials] from allowing such a certification to occur.”

Putting the merits of the DOJ’s argument aside — election law experts have deemed it incredibly weak — its complaint expresses an interest, contra Blanche’s post, in stopping the certification of Alaska’s election. To “enjoin” something is to stop it from happening. At least, according to the complaint, the DOJ wants to halt Alaska’s certification if the result is “prejudiced” by the other Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot, At least, according to the complaint, the DOJ wants to halt Alaska’s certification if the result is “prejudiced” by the other Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot — a claim that would be difficult to demonstrate in a timely manner, if ever.

Furthermore, in the complaint’s “prayer for relief,” which is the standard section where a plaintiff tells a court what it wants, the DOJ lists two specific things.

First, it asks the court to: “Declare that certification of any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, would violate Defendants’ duties under the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] to ‘protect the integrity of the electoral process.’”

Second, it asks the court: “Defendants from certifying any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan and any further procedures or relief this Court deems necessary and appropriate to determine what the result would have been absent Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot.”

That second request for relief reads as if it is missing a word at the beginning. If so, then based on the rest of the complaint, the word “Enjoin” would seem to fit well. As in: Enjoin defendants from certifying … (I asked the DOJ press office whether a word is missing there, and if so, what that word is, but I did not immediately hear back.)

Whatever’s happening with that line, the government’s opponents are reading the complaint as seeking to block certification. Peltola’s campaign committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which are attempting to join in the case to get it dismissed, said in a Sunday filing that the “DOJ seeks an unprecedented order precluding certification of the U.S. Senate election if the candidate the President favors loses narrowly.”

Calling the government’s claims “utterly without legal basis,” they said the Alaska district court “should not allow this lawsuit to hang like the Sword of Damocles over the ongoing election, lending false legitimacy to the President’s and the Attorney General’s ongoing efforts to spread false narratives about Alaska’s elections as voting continues and as results begin to be tabulated next week.”

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