Maurene Comey’s Case Is More Consequential Than Her Father’s

The government of North Korea practices “kin punishment,” which means that the state penalizes those who commit political offenses and their relatives as well. With at least one prominent family, the Trump administration has apparently adopted a similar model.

In a pretrial hearing scheduled for Thursday in Alexandria, Va., James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, will challenge the appointment of Lindsey Halligan, the federal prosecutor who signed his indictment in September. Mr. Comey is the first former senior official to face criminal prosecution by the Trump administration, but the case against him turns on the application of well-established legal principles. Are the charges vindictive? Does the indictment clearly specify criminal acts? Did Mr. Comey, in fact, give false testimony? The outcome of the prosecution will resonate widely, but only Mr. Comey will experience the consequences of the verdict.

Maurene Comey, his eldest daughter, was fired July 16 by the Justice Department from her position as a career federal prosecutor, and she, in turn, sued to get her job back. Pretrial proceedings in her civil case are now underway in the same New York courthouse where Ms. Comey used to represent the government.

Both cases are potential landmarks in the history of American justice, but the legal precedent established by the daughter’s case may turn out to be far more consequential than the finding in her father’s. The resolution of Ms. Comey’s challenge to her dismissal could affect the legal rights of nearly all federal employees.

Ms. Comey’s claim is straightforward. She spent a decade as an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. In that role, she enjoyed the protections of the federal Civil Service, which has been in existence for more than a century.

According to the latest version of the law, passed in 1978, employees are entitled to “fair and equitable treatment … without regard to political affiliation … and with proper regard for their privacy and constitutional rights,” and personnel actions (including firings) must be based on merit and fitness, and must not be arbitrary, capricious or discriminatory. According to her legal claim, Ms. Comey was fired in violation of these provisions.

Her lawsuit is a nearly perfect test case, because she had an impeccable record as a prosecutor. Through her decade of service, she received consistently “outstanding” performance reviews, and she was promoted to leadership positions within the Southern District office. She handled some of the department’s highest-profile cases, including the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, for sex trafficking, before his suicide and she later successfully prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell. Shortly before she was fired, she was part of the team that won only a partial conviction of Sean “Diddy” Combs for various sex-related offenses. Ms. Comey has maintained that there was never any allegation, much less proof, offered to her that her performance was deficient.

So why was she fired? Throughout 2025, Ms. Comey was a target of Laura Loomer, the right-wing social media influencer whose public denunciations of several members of the Trump administration, including Gen. Timothy Haugh, director of the National Security Agency, led to their dismissals. Ms. Loomer has positioned herself as the president’s protector and uses her presence on social media to lead the charge against those she accuses of insufficient loyalty to the commander in chief. Ms. Loomer called for Ms. Comey to be fired as a “national security risk” because of her “proximity to a criminal,” that is, her father.

The formal notice of Ms. Comey’s dismissal, which came in a brief email from a Justice Department official in Washington, gave no reason for her termination. Rather, she was told only that she was being fired “pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution,” the provision that defines the powers of the president. Those brief words — and notably what the firing message omitted — reveal the legal stakes of Ms. Comey’s lawsuit.

The president has the absolute right to fire political appointees, like cabinet members and other senior officials in his administration. But the vast majority of federal employees, including line prosecutors like Ms. Comey, have been protected by the Civil Service rules, and that’s what the Justice Department didn’t address in the email informing her of her dismissal.

“Ms. Comey has a very good case that she was fired in violation of the Civil Service act, which says you have to be fired for cause, and they have stated no cause for firing her,” said Richard Pierce Jr., a law professor at George Washington University, who is an authority on Civil Service law.

Civil Service has deep roots in American government. “The fight over the ‘spoils system’ defined American politics in the late 19th century,” said Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard. “When Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, defeated Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, in 1888, the first thing Harrison did was fire 40,000 postal workers so he could replace them with Republicans. The entire system was inefficient and corrupt.”

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 was intended to establish job qualification, rather than political affiliation, as the primary criterion for federal employment, but the law wasn’t widely carried out until the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, in the Progressive Era heyday of the early 20th century. “The idea was to move most federal jobs to a merit system, and to outlaw politically based firings by a new administration in town,” Professor Carpenter said. With various tweaks, as in the 1978 law, the Civil Service remained largely politically untouchable, until now.

Judicial recognition of presidents’ constitutional right to fire federal employees without giving a reason, and in plain violation of Civil Service rules, would be an enormous expansion of executive power. That’s what President Trump has attempted to do in a number of areas, including tariffs, immigration and war powers — all according to a theory of constitutional law known as the unitary executive.

In this term, the Supreme Court will be testing the limits of this theory when it considers whether Mr. Trump has the right to fire the leaders of purportedly independent agencies, like the Federal Reserve, before the end of their fixed terms. Ms. Comey’s case raises a further question about the extension of executive power: whether the president can also fire — for any reason or no reason — hundreds of thousands of other federal employees.

There’s already one sign of the priority that Mr. Trump assigns to his claim that he can fire any federal employee. The leading academic spokesperson for the idea that the Constitution gives the president nearly unfettered authority over the federal work force was a law professor at Catholic University of America named Jennifer Mascott, and Mr. Trump rewarded her for her views with a nomination to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She was confirmed by the Senate last month. Neither Comeys’ case will be appealed to the Third Circuit, but the elevation of such a prominent voice for presidential power over federal employment may reverberate throughout the federal judiciary.

Thanks to Civil Service laws, most federal employees were able to believe that they served outside the churn of electoral politics and that their work would continue seamlessly from one administration to the next. That insulation from partisan upheaval is often a major attraction for people like Ms. Comey, who was aptly described by her lawyers as “an exemplary, dedicated and highly decorated public servant.”

The greatest risk of putting the tenure of all federal employees at the whim of the president is not that he will fire them all; it’s that people like Ms. Comey will not seek out the work in the first place.