Roger Rogoff was sworn in as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington before 8 a.m. local time on July 15 at the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle. He walked to the U.S. Attorney's Office, asked to meet with the man the Trump administration had wanted in the job, and sat down in the lobby to wait. Before the meeting happened, an email landed: President Trump had removed him from office.
The whole thing took less than an hour. The Washington Examiner reported the gap at just 54 minutes.
The firing sets up a direct confrontation between the executive branch and the federal judiciary over who controls U.S. attorney appointments, and whether district court judges can fill a vacancy the administration deliberately left open. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made the administration's position plain in a post on X, published while he was simultaneously testifying before the Senate in his own confirmation hearing: "District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and POTUS can fire them."
The mechanics matter. Federal law allows the attorney general to name an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days. If that window closes without a Senate-confirmed nominee in place, the district's federal judges may appoint someone to serve until the vacancy is filled. The Trump administration installed Charles Neil Floyd as interim U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington. His 120-day term expired in February. Rather than send Floyd's nomination to the Senate, the administration made him first assistant U.S. attorney and left the top job vacant.
That maneuver kept the administration's preferred prosecutor in the office without subjecting him to Senate confirmation. It also triggered the statutory fallback. All 17 active and senior federal judges in the district, appointed by five presidents, 10 by Democrats and seven by Republicans, opened an application process and unanimously selected Rogoff.
Rogoff, 57, spent 20 years as a state prosecutor and six years as a federal prosecutor before serving as a King County Superior Court judge. He was, by any conventional measure, a career law enforcement figure, not a political activist parachuted into the role.
Blanche, however, said the judges had "abandoned the time-honored process of consultation with the administration so that the selected U.S. Attorney is qualified to serve in the administration." The clear implication: the bench moved without the White House's blessing, and the White House responded accordingly.
Rogoff told The New York Times he knew the risk going in. He called the U.S. attorney post "the best job there is." He showed up at the courthouse, took the oath, and headed straight to the office to introduce himself to Floyd. He never got the meeting.
Instead, he got an email, delivered while he stood in the lobby, informing him that the president had terminated his appointment. The Associated Press confirmed the firing came less than one hour after the unanimous judicial appointment.
Rogoff has since retained an employment law firm and is considering a legal challenge. He told the Times:
"I don't think it's the way to run the Department of Justice. When you have this sort of made up way of putting people in these positions, the process breaks down."
He also reflected on the appointment itself, saying he was proud that judges before whom he had spent his career appearing "believed that I was the right person to do this work."
Seattle is not the only district where this fight is playing out. The administration has fired court-appointed U.S. attorneys in other jurisdictions, and courts have pushed back, particularly in Democrat-heavy districts.
In New Jersey, former top federal prosecutor Alina Habba resigned after an appeals court ruled she had been serving unlawfully. In Virginia, acting U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan left her post after a judge found her appointment unlawful and dismissed indictments she had brought against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.
Breitbart noted that a federal appeals court panel had previously expressed doubt about the legality of Floyd's appointment, which gave the 17 judges additional reason to act.
The pattern is consistent: the administration has used novel personnel maneuvers, acting titles, first-assistant designations, and other workarounds, to keep preferred prosecutors in place without Senate confirmation. When courts have intervened, the administration has pushed back by firing the replacements.
The timing of Blanche's X post was striking. He announced Rogoff's firing from the Senate hearing room, or at least while the hearing was in session, during his own confirmation proceedings for attorney general. Rogoff's situation was not raised during Wednesday's hearing, though it may surface Thursday when Blanche returns before the committee.
Blanche's confirmation has already drawn friction. Even some Republicans have signaled tough questions for the acting attorney general, and the Rogoff episode hands Democrats fresh ammunition.
Sen. Patty Murray, the Washington state Democrat, blasted the firing in a written statement. She praised Rogoff's career and said he "was appointed legally by the federal judges in the Western District of Washington." Then she went further: "This administration doesn't want to deal with advice and consent, they just want to install cronies to carry out a corrupt political agenda."
Murray's framing, "cronies," "corrupt", is predictable partisan rhetoric. But the underlying procedural question is real. The administration chose not to send Floyd's nomination to the Senate. It let the 120-day clock run. When the judges exercised their statutory authority to fill the gap, the White House fired their pick in under an hour.
The Washington Times reported that Murray also said Rogoff "should have never been fired" and accused the president of wanting "to appoint an out-of-touch extremist who will put Trump over the rule of law."
Blanche's legal argument is straightforward: the president can fire a temporary U.S. attorney appointed by district judges. That power is not in serious dispute as a general proposition. Presidents have broad authority over executive-branch personnel, and U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president when they are presidential appointees.
The harder question is whether a court-appointed interim U.S. attorney, installed under a specific statutory provision because the administration failed to fill the seat through the normal process, occupies the same legal ground. Rogoff's potential lawsuit may force a court to answer that question directly.
Blanche has not been shy about exercising DOJ authority on multiple fronts since taking over as acting attorney general. His willingness to fire Rogoff mid-hearing suggests the administration views this as a settled question internally, even if the courts have not fully resolved it.
Newsmax reported that the administration has "repeatedly used novel personnel maneuvers to keep unconfirmed prosecutors in place indefinitely, bypassing Senate confirmation requirements." That characterization, if accurate, describes an approach that treats Senate confirmation as optional, not as the constitutional default the Founders designed.
Several questions remain open. Has the administration formally nominated anyone, Floyd or otherwise, for the Western District seat? Which employment law firm has Rogoff retained, and when will he decide whether to sue? Did Rogoff ever speak with Floyd before the email arrived, or was the meeting preempted entirely?
And perhaps most important: if a court rules that the president cannot fire a judge-appointed interim U.S. attorney installed under the statutory fallback, what happens to the administration's broader strategy of avoiding Senate confirmation across multiple districts?
The administration has moved aggressively to reshape federal law enforcement from the inside. That ambition is not the problem. The problem is when the mechanism for getting there looks less like constitutional governance and more like a workaround designed to avoid the very process the Constitution prescribes.
Executive power is real, and presidents deserve prosecutors they trust. But the Senate confirmation process exists for a reason, and letting a 120-day clock expire, leaving a seat empty, and then firing the judges' lawful replacement within the hour is not the same thing as winning a confirmation vote. If the administration wants its people in these jobs, the cleanest path runs through the Senate, not around it.
