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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A University of Chicago fraternity is facing allegations of sexual assault from a local resident in a lawsuit filed this week.

The 19-year-old woman, who is not a student at the school and is identified in the suit only as “Jane Doe,” alleged that she was raped at a party at the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house in February after a fraternity member offered her “unidentified alcohol” that made her lightheaded and unsteady. According to the complaint, obtained by MS NOW, the assault occurred in a “secluded room” of the house while the woman was “visibly impaired” and both physically and mentally incapable of giving consent.

Filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, the lawsuit comes on the heels of a national reckoning around sexual misconduct at universities, which was sparked last month when allegations of a 2024 gang rape at Cornell University resurfaced in a civil suit.

News of the Chicago lawsuit was first reported by NBC News on Tuesday.

The complaint named just two defendants: the Alpha Delta Phi Inc. national organization, which governs individual chapters and memberships, and the fraternity’s Chicago chapter. Jane Doe claimed that both were negligent in ensuring the safety of guests at the Chicago house, especially given multiple allegations of sexual assault at the same residence, which has been maintained by the chapter for almost 100 years.

According to the complaint, two alleged sexual assaults occurred in the same month in 2009 at the same Alpha Delta Phi house where Jane Doe alleges she was raped. Her complaint alleges that those incidents, combined with the documented prevalence of campus sexual assault, should have put both the national fraternity and its Chicago chapter on notice of the serious and specific risks of sexual assault to party guests like Jane Doe at the Alpha Delta Phi house.

In a statement provided to MS NOW, Gerald McSwiggan, a spokesperson for the University of Chicago, called the allegations “very disturbing to the University community” and said the school was “committed to addressing and preventing incidents of sexual assault.” McSwiggan noted that the university was not named as a defendant in the suit and was prepared to work with the Chicago Police Department as it investigates.

Jane Doe’s lead attorney, Mike Grieco, confirmed to MS NOW that the university was not a defendant but said that following discovery, he could amend the complaint to seek damages from the university as well.

A representative from Alpha Delta Phi’s national office confirmed to MS NOW that the fraternity member accused of perpetrating the assault — who is named in the complaint but is not listed a defendant — has been suspended from the organization. Alpha Delta Phi’s statement described the alleged conduct as “deeply troubling and inconsistent with our values” and said the fraternity takes the allegations “extremely seriously,” adding, “We are committed to the safety and well-being of our members and communities and will cooperate with law enforcement as appropriate.”

Jane Doe alleges in the complaint that the fraternity member left her unconscious in a bedroom of the house, and that other members initially blocked a friend who accompanied her to the party from searching for her until another member discovered Jane Doe unconscious and allowed the friend to enter. Jane Doe alleges that she was “struggling to speak and required assistance to walk” when leaving the room where she was assaulted.

The morning after the alleged assault, Jane Doe allegedly “awoke to blood stains in her underwear” and made a report to the Chicago Police Department, the complaint states. MS NOW obtained the police report, which states the woman said she believed the alcohol she received that night “might have been laced with [an] unknown substance” and that she “does not remember giving consent,” though she remembers asking the man to wear a condom and he refused.

Grieco told MS NOW that Jane Doe went to a hospital and underwent rape kit testing the morning after the assault, which the police report confirms. At the hospital, the woman provided police with a photo of the alleged perpetrator, according to the incident report.

Grieco said he was unaware of whether CPD or the university police ever interviewed the alleged perpetrator or anyone else other than his client. He said he hopes the suit will prod both departments to prioritize their investigations.

The lawsuit was filed just over a week after a second woman alleged she was sexually assaulted at another University of Chicago fraternity house, according to a police report obtained by MS NOW. The 21-year-old woman told police that she attended a party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi house. After consuming about three cans of alcohol, a man she had been dancing with — and whose advances she had refused — followed her into the bathroom. There, she lost consciousness and awoke to find her bodysuit undone at the bottom and her bra removed, according to the incident report. She told authorities “that she was unable to resist due to her altered state of consciousness.” The Chicago Sun-Times previously reported that the woman does not attend the university.

The woman’s friend told police that when she was searching for her, she saw “three to five males standing outside the bathroom door, cheering and appearing to encourage the activity inside,” according to the incident report, which also states that the men denied to the woman’s friend that Jane Doe was inside the bathroom. When the friend demanded entry, one of the men “grabbed [her] by the hair to prevent her from entering,” the report states. After picking the lock, she managed to open the door and found the alleged perpetrator “standing over [the woman] with his pants down” and the woman “not fully conscious” with her shirt undone. The man told the friend that “everything was ‘cool,’” according to the incident report.

According to the report, when the woman and her friends left the residence, they confronted the alleged offender and the men who had been cheering outside the bathroom. The group fled and the woman pursued them until she found university police and filed a report. The woman received a rape kit at a hospital.

The university says it alerted students on Oct. 11 that a sexual assault had allegedly occurred at a frat house near campus that day. Two days later, a second public alert said that a “person of interest” who was not “affiliated with the university” had been identified and banned from campus.

According to a statement posted to the Instagram page of the school’s Alpha Epsilon Pi chapter, the perpetrator “was chased out of the building” and “captured on cameras when they fled.” Both the school’s chapter and the fraternity’s national organization condemned the incident and said they supported the victim and the police investigation.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department said that nobody was in custody in connection with either alleged incident — the one on Oct. 11 or the one described in the lawsuit — and that both investigations were ongoing.

The university held a safety meeting on Wednesday night, according to Grieco and NBC Chicago. But McSwiggan, the university spokesperson, said the meeting had been planned prior to Jane Doe’s lawsuit.

Grieco told MS NOW the meeting highlighted the chasm between the university’s stated policy on fraternities — the institution says it does not recognize them —and officials’ responsibilities to prevent and address sexual assault. That’s why, he said, Jane Doe’s lawsuit focuses on achieving institutional accountability, not criminal prosecution.

Meanwhile, Jane Doe, who was a college student living in Cook County at the time of the assault, is no longer enrolled in school, according to Grieco.

“She is in therapy,” he said, “and focused on her recovery.”

This story was updated to incorporate details from the police reports obtained by MS NOW.

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