ALEXANDRIA, Va. ― After President Donald Trump abruptly fired FEMA chief financial officer Mary Comans based on false accusations that she paid millions to house undocumented immigrants, a federal judge formally cleared her name on Tuesday.

“The facts establish that high-ranking government officials, including the [former] Secretary of the department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Elon Musk, engaged in a coordinated public relations campaign to impugn the personal and professional integrity of Ms. Comans,” U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick wrote Tuesday.

Fitzpatrick wrote that the record has shown she was falsely accused of “laundering ‘forbidden funding,’ violating a presidential executive order, orders of the DHS Secretary, circumventing leadership and frustrating the will of the American people.”

But all of that was a “premeditated campaign” to impugn her, the judge found, and the statements made against her by administration officials were derogatory and demonstrably false.

“With no regard for truth, and with no consideration for the personal and professional effect on Ms. Comans, government officials exploited their access to mass media outlets to broadcast false information,” Fitzpatrick wrote.

U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff ruled in July that Comans was unjustly fired and that the administration had baldly ignored the constitutionally-required process for terminating inferior executive branch officials. He did not mandate that she be reinstated as FEMA CFO, but he did make her an unusual offer: She could have another hearing, with the sole purpose of clearing her name.

Name-clearing hearings are typically held internally within an agency. But because of how she was fired, and as Fitzpatrick explained Tuesday, it was left to the courts to ensure a fair outcome.

“[Given] the outrageous government conduct, including by those at DHS, in knowingly spreading false information about Ms. Comans, it is essential that this process be conducted by an independent judicial officer and memorialized in an order of the court,” he wrote.

Comans was abruptly fired last February as officials from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, tore through the federal government’s labor force, laying off thousands of people while making sweeping indiscriminate cuts to various government budgets at Trump’s behest.

Comans was a veteran federal official who started her career working at the FDA in 2004 before moving to the Department of Homeland Security in 2005. Climbing the civil service ranks, she became chief financial officer for FEMA in 2017. She had oversight of the agency’s $45 million budget, led a staff of nearly 500 people, and provided policy guidance to higher ranking officials at numerous government agencies, including the White House. She had received a perfect rating at her final performance review before she was fired, court records show.

The termination letter sent to her by a senior official at FEMA in February 2025 blindsided her, Comans alleged in her lawsuit against the administration last July. She was being “removed” immediately and “at the direction of the President” whose Article II executive authority allowed him to fire without explanation, the letter claimed.

The same day she received the letter, DHS issued a press release claiming Comans and three other FEMA officials were being fired because they had “circumvent[ed] leadership” to make “egregious payments” of nearly $60 million “for luxury NYC hotels for migrants.” The press release painted Comans and others accused as “deep state activists.”

DHS spokespeople slammed Comans in the press, accusing her of having “effectively laundered” money. Right-wing influencers like Laura Loomer seized on her online, and even DOGE head and Trump ally Elon Musk retweeted a photo of her and details from the press release with his own caption, “A criminal action.”

When Comans sued, she said a DOGE official had actually approved the disbursement of funds for the hotels and that she never, as the Trump administration claimed, acted “unilaterally.”

Comans said she never had a legitimate chance to contest her firing. The entity that would typically hear such challenges, the Merit Systems Protection Board, had been hit by its own presidential firing, and the board lacked a quorum to hear her complaint.

Going to court, she and her lawyers argued, was the only way to challenge the firing, determine whether Trump had unilateral authority to oust her and ultimately, to clear her name.

In his decision about her firing, Nachmanoff noted that in 1886, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Perkins that only Congress could decide how “inferior” officials at the executive branch level could be removed.

Comans, Nachmanoff ruled, was an inferior officer because despite her great responsibilities as FEMA CFO, she “was not a policymaker, rule maker, regulator, investigator, prosecutor, litigator, adjudicator, or anything of the sort.”

“She was unable to ‘bring the coercive power of the state to bear on millions of private citizens,’ let alone a single person,” Nachmanoff wrote.

Comans’ attorney, Mark Zaid, told HuffPost the decision in her case was a win for federal workers.

“The decisions in Comans’ case are ensuring long-standing protections for federal employees still exist in the wake of this Administration’s destructive efforts to create an at-will workforce. We have rarely seen the level of vitriolic behavior from the Executive Branch directed at its own civil servants as in the last 16 months,” he said. “The Court’s rulings have solidified that federal employees not only retain their legal rights as a shield but can also fight back with a sword.”

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

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