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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