A federal judge on Monday ruled that Maureen Comey, a former senior prosecutor at the Justice Department and the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, was unlawfully fired and is entitled to back pay.

In a 55-page opinion, Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York ruled that Comey’s July 2025 firing from her job as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was a violation of the Civil Service Reform Act and the Constitution. Furman, an Obama appointee, ordered her reinstated with back pay from her firing through December 2025, when she accepted a job as a partner with a Manhattan-based law firm. The opinion does not give Comey the option to return to the prosecutor’s office.

Furman also determined the DOJ violated separation of powers principles under the Constitution and Comey’s Fifth Amendment due process rights, as well as her rights under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Comey filed a civil suit against the DOJ after she was fired last year in a terse letter that stated she was being terminated “pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States,” without further elaboration. Her lawsuit alleged that she was unlawfully fired because of her affiliation to her father — whom President Donald Trump has unsuccessfully sought to prosecute — and/or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs. She also named then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, and the White House as defendants.

Comey led the Southern District of New York’s cases against convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, music mogul Sean Combs and others. Furman noted that during her tenure, Comey “consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike.” Comey spent nearly a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney at the Southern District of New York before she was fired.

While the court’s decision is a near-total victory for Comey on her legal claims, she has been waiting for relief since September 2025, when she filed her complaint. Comey joined the Manhattan-based law firm of Patterson Belknap as a partner three months later.

Comey’s lawyers called the decision a “hard-earned victory” for her and “all civil servants and … all fighting for the rule of law.”

“This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law,” they said in a statement.

Maurene Comey did not respond to a request for comment from MS NOW.

A DOJ spokesperson said the department “disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course.”

The Trump DOJ has fired several high-level prosecutors who have refused to carry out the administration’s priorities — including one who declined to lead the prosecution of James Comey. That case has been delayed until early next year. In the meantime, the former FBI director has vowed to continue critcizing Trump despite the pending litigation.

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House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Monday released an unsigned staff report laying out what they call “the case against Donald Trump emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s desperate efforts to cover it up,” with those Democrats now calling for an independent special counsel to investigate the president as well as what they describe as Attorney General Todd Blanche’s conflicts of interest and the Justice Department’s reluctance to share relevant evidence with state and foreign law enforcement.

“The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard,” the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement. “Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice.”

The more than 50-page report alleges that Trump was “an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the mid-to-late 1990s.” Although it also contains at least one entirely new allegation against the president, it provides no direct evidence other than the woman’s own conversations with Judiciary Committee staff.

For years, Trump has denied that he engaged in any sexual misconduct with any woman connected to Jeffrey Epstein, and he has also said that he knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes.

The report also repeats several other longstanding, unsubstantiated allegations against Trump.

A Democratic Judiciary Committee source told MS NOW the report draws on publicly available accounts as well as conversations with survivors. The source declined to provide additional details about those conversations, citing concerns for survivors’ privacy. The source also declined to quantify how many survivor conversations they had.

The report also compares Trump’s statements about Epstein in recent years to documentary evidence — including emails, deposition transcripts, Trump’s prior public statements, and Trump’s drawings and signatures.

Among the discrepancies highlighted in the report are inconsistencies with what Trump has said about his awareness of Epstein’s crimes.

The report also suggests that DOJ officials, including the attorney general, are “doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark” about Trump’s alleged participation in Epstein’s abuse of young women.

“Attorney General Blanche may have engaged in criminal obstruction of justice while acting on a mission to protect Trump,” the report alleges.

The report lays out how Blanche’s meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell “potentially constituted witness tampering and obstruction of an official proceeding.”

“Blanche’s apparent instructions not to discuss a specific Epstein victim, and how that victim could implicate Donald Trump, could easily run afoul of 18 U.S.C. § 1512, which forbids hindering or delaying the communication of information relating to the potential commission of a federal offense to a law enforcement officer, as well as corruptly influencing the testimony of any person in an official proceeding — such as a congressional interview and investigation,” Democrats write in the report.

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In June, a federal judge found that Blanche had effectively conceded that DOJ was in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by not producing certain unredacted and foreign language documents, among other issues. DOJ is appealing that ruling.

Blanche himself bristled at the suggestion that the Justice Department has withheld documents that should have been released, maintaining that DOJ “undertook a Herculean task to review millions and millions of potentially responsive files” and met their review and production obligations “expeditiously.”

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, told MS NOW, that “none of these allegations are true.”

“This ‘report’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans from the surging Republican momentum driven by President Trump’s historic achievements,” Bis said. “The President kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club at Mar-a-Lago because he was a creep, and he has been fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein.”

While only Democratic staff authored Monday’s report, the House Judiciary Committee has not been the principal congressional committee investigating Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes and whether others participated in or enabled his abuse.

The investigation from the House Oversight Committee has included interviews with a number of former Epstein employees, such as his lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountant Richard Kahn, as well as one of his survivors and alleged co-conspirators. That investigation principally focused on who else has directly participated in, as well as funded or otherwise enabled, Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

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