A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration illegally fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director and Trump critic James Comey, from her position as a Justice Department prosecutor. The decision sharply rebuked the administration’s claimed authority to terminate career federal employees it dislikes.

Although the ruling applies specifically to Maurene Comey, its implications extend beyond her case. It rejects the Trump administration’s position that the Constitution allows such dismissals for any reason, a view administration officials have repeatedly cited during a sweeping purge of the federal workforce.

Comey had served as an assistant U.S. attorney for a decade. Judge Jesse M. Furman found that she was dismissed in July 2025 despite working on some of the nation’s highest-profile cases and consistently receiving “the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike.”

After her termination, Comey sued the Justice Department and other defendants. She argued that the firing violated the constitutional separation of powers, the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. She said she was dismissed because she was James Comey’s daughter—Trump has long regarded him as an enemy—or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both, according to Furman’s ruling.

Furman rejected the government’s argument that Comey could be fired because federal prosecutors exercise the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” powers. He also said the government’s claim that Congress is prohibited from regulating the removal of federal prosecutors “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.”

“Indeed, to accept Defendants’ argument would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system,” Furman wrote.

The judge ruled that Comey’s firing violated the separation of powers, the Administrative Procedure Act, her Fifth Amendment due-process rights and her statutory rights. He deferred a decision on her First Amendment claim pending further arguments. Furman said he was inclined to dismiss that claim because it was largely moot: Comey is now in private practice and is no longer seeking actual reinstatement.

Furman, who was nominated to the bench in 2011 by then-Democratic President Barack Obama, granted Comey retroactive reinstatement and back pay from the date of her firing through Dec. 20. The remedy was intended to “make her whole” and prevent adverse employment consequences resulting from the “unlawful termination.”

The Justice Department said in a statement that it “disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course.” That appeal means the ruling remains subject to further review, while the decision’s treatment of the government’s removal-power argument places the limits on executive authority at the center of the next stage of the case.

Comey’s attorneys—Ellen Blain, Nicole Gueron, Deepa Vanamali and Margaret Donovan—praised the ruling.

“This hard-earned victory belongs to Ms. Comey, to all civil servants, and to all fighting for the rule of law,” they said. “As the Court correctly held, to accept the government’s argument about unlimited executive power ‘would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.’ This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law.”

Comey was fired two weeks after leading the prosecution of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs. The case ended with a conviction on prostitution-related charges and an acquittal on other charges. She also worked on the sex-trafficking prosecutions of financier Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in jail a month after his 2019 arrest, and Epstein’s former girlfriend and longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

During the Trump administration, the Justice Department has fired scores of career employees, including prosecutors and FBI agents who participated in investigations involving Trump or were perceived as opposing the administration’s agenda. Some of those dismissals have also led to federal lawsuits.

Maurene Comey’s firing was viewed as particularly personal because of the longstanding adversarial relationship between her father and Trump. Trump fired James Comey as FBI director in May 2017 while the bureau was investigating ties between Russia and the Republican’s successful 2016 presidential campaign. Trump has repeatedly called for Comey to be jailed, and the Justice Department has pursued that outcome with mixed success.

A previous criminal case accused James Comey of lying to Congress in 2020. A judge dismissed it after concluding that the prosecutor who brought the charges had been illegally appointed. A separate pending indictment accuses the former FBI director of threatening Trump through an Instagram photograph of seashells arranged numerically as “86 47.” Comey has sought to dismiss that case, which some legal experts have viewed skeptically.

Tucker and Durkin reported from Washington.

Originally published on Fortune.com.