Keep an eye on Maurene Comey’s case for unlawful firing by the Department of Justice. If she wins, it’s at least a temporary victory for the continued existence of the rule of law in this country. If she loses, it’s the end of justice without fear or favor in this country.
Pam Bondi and company have hollowed out the Department of Justice to serve President Trump’s personal interests. News outlets describe mass resignations and firings, with some reports citing more than 70 percent attrition in the Civil Rights Division. The impact remains largely hidden but will certainly be profound. These firings come in many shapes and sizes, including employees who chose to leave or were accused (often with no credible basis) of improper conduct.
The lawsuit filed last week by Comey, the former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, or SDNY, is a crucial test of whether the Trump administration truly has the power to strip the DOJ of its reputation for apolitical justice.
That is because Comey’s service was exemplary. The department did not offer an argument of improper conduct on her part, and its case for discharge is particularly weak and tawdry. It is a pristine test of Trump’s and Bondi’s determination to ruin what the department has always stood for.
Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, is a prosecutor’s prosecutor—widely respected among her peers. She was a star in the SDNY, the crown jewel of the Justice Department, where she handled marquee criminal cases, including Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sean Combs. There is no colorable argument that she is anything but exemplary, as reflected in her performance reviews.
She is also the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, who sits high on Trump’s list of revenge targets. His “offenses” amount to telling the truth about Trump’s improper attempts to influence him. (Remember Trump’s grandstanding threat: “He’d better hope there are not tapes”?)
Most recently, Trump accused Jim Comey of trying to assassinate him based on a cryptic message containing the numbers 86 and 47 (Trump is the forty-seventh president, and 86 is slang for “all out”), which he referred to Bondi to investigate. Comey said he had no idea what Trump was talking about.
Maurene Comey entered broader public attention in the Epstein-Maxwell case, when the administration tried to deflect calls for Epstein file disclosures by pointing instead to grand jury materials from her prosecutions—though it was obvious that those materials never contained Epstein’s files.
Shortly after this episode, in July of this year, Comey received the following notice from the Department: “You are being terminated pursuant to Article II of the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the United States.”
That’s it. No explanation. No criticism. No cause. No due process. At most, some assertion that all of Comey’s career protections, and the norms protecting prosecutorial independence, are unconstitutional under Article II because the president has a right to fire whomever he pleases for whatever reason he pleases.
Those protections, and the norms that reinforce them, were near inviolate before 2025. As a former U.S. attorney, I—and any of my colleagues—could tell you that even trying to fire a career AUSA like Comey entailed a bureaucratic ordeal and multiple obstacles.
Many lawsuits challenging Trump’s purges of federal employees get bogged down in details—job classifications, mixed records, plausible rationales for termination. Not here. Maurene Comey is the textbook career prosecutor with statutory and constitutional protections against this kind of summary dismissal. The government can’t point to cause. It can’t argue she was an at-will political hire. And it can’t identify a single action of hers that wasn’t by the book—and often, her behavior was exemplary. Indeed, the widespread assumption—and the department’s cryptic dismissal notice does nothing to dispel it—is that Comey was targeted solely because she is the daughter of Trump’s nemesis.
Comey was ousted because Trump detests her father, and because the Trump-aligned outrage machine—most colorfully, Laura Loomer—demanded her head. His reprisal campaign here extends beyond the immediate antagonist to his family. Even by the standards of despotic bosses, that is an asinine, and dangerous, basis for firing.
In that sense, Comey is the perfect test case. Her firing strips the issue to its essence: Can the president cashier career prosecutors for irrational—even chaotic—reasons, simply because he feels like it?
The answer to that question would not have been in doubt a year ago. The law is long established. The Civil Service Reform Act, and related due process protections, bars arbitrary, politically motivated firings of career employees. AUSAs, while their own category of “career excepted-service employees,” are covered. And due process principles require that any firing be for cause, with notice and an opportunity to respond. By those metrics, Comey’s case is a slam dunk.
But Trump has repeatedly asserted power to ravage the federal workforce, and the Supreme Court, especially of late, has more often than not backed him up. Other cases over the last nine months have also produced unpleasant surprises in shadow docket rulings.
Moreover, there is a real possibility that courts recognize the violations and award damages but stop short of reinstatement—the only result that would truly vindicate Comey and protect the public interest in an independent DOJ. Some courts of appeals have already suggested that even if the firing was illegal, they lack authority to order the executive branch to put people back to work.
Comey’s lawsuit thus has outsize importance. It is, in a sense, the test case about apolitical and impartial justice, and everything those values represent. If Comey loses—or if the courts refuse reinstatement—it would sound the death knell for the fragile ideal that federal prosecutors can operate free of political pressure and free from serving a political master.
The stakes go well beyond Comey’s professional standing. What hangs in the balance is whether Americans can have confidence that the awesome power of the federal government will be exercised according to law rather than personal will or, worse, spite. A loss for Comey would signal to every prosecutor, and to every citizen who depends on impartial justice, that the department has become an arm of presidential will rather than an agent of principled justice.
