Roger Rogoff took the oath as US attorney for the Western District of Washington before 8 a.m. Wednesday at the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle. He then walked to the US Attorney’s Office and asked to meet Charles Neil Floyd, the administration’s preferred candidate for the job he had just been sworn into.
While he sat in the lobby waiting, an email arrived. President Trump had removed him from office.
Who fired him, and how
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced it on X while he was in the middle of testifying at his own Senate confirmation hearing. His argument was procedural: district court judges may appoint a temporary US attorney, and the president may fire that person. He accused the Washington judges of abandoning the practice of consulting the administration before selecting someone, and stated plainly that Trump had fired Rogoff.
The rule underneath the fight
US attorneys are normally nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Federal law lets the attorney general install an interim for 120 days. If that window closes with no confirmed nominee, the district’s judges may appoint someone to serve until the seat is filled.
Floyd’s 120 days ran out in February. Rather than send his nomination to the Senate, the administration made him first assistant US attorney and left the top job empty. The judges then opened an application process and filled it themselves.
So the sequence matters: the judges’ power to appoint only switched on because the seat was left vacant past the deadline. Whether that vacancy was strategy or obstruction is precisely what the two sides disagree about the administration says Senate Democrats made confirmation impossible; critics say the vacancy was engineered to keep an unconfirmed favourite in place indefinitely.
Who Rogoff is, and who picked him
Rogoff, 57, spent 20 years as a state prosecutor and six as a federal one before becoming a King County Superior Court judge.
All 17 active and senior federal judges in the district signed off on him 10 appointed by Democratic presidents, 7 by Republicans. That detail is worth sitting with. This wasn’t a partisan bloc installing an ally; it was a unanimous bench including Republican appointees.
He knew what he was walking into. He said as much afterwards he expected the administration might fire him immediately and took the job anyway, calling it the best job there is. He told the New York Times the improvised approach to filling these posts is no way to run the Justice Department.
He has hired an employment law firm and is weighing a legal challenge.
Not the first
Seattle is one front in a wider fight. In New Jersey, Alina Habba resigned as top federal prosecutor after an appeals court ruled she had been serving unlawfully. In Virginia, Lindsey Halligan left an acting US attorney post after a judge found her appointment unlawful and dismissed the indictments she had brought against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. The administration has fired court-appointed US attorneys in other districts too.
Senator Patty Murray, who had opposed Floyd for the role, called Rogoff’s appointment lawful and accused the administration of wanting to skip advice and consent entirely in favour of installing loyalists.
Why it’s more than a personnel story
The Halligan case is the reason this isn’t just procedural noise. When a court found her appointment invalid, real criminal indictments collapsed with it. That’s the stake: prosecutions brought by someone whose authority is later voided don’t necessarily survive the ruling.
Which puts the administration in a bind of its own making. Every workaround that keeps a preferred prosecutor in place without Senate confirmation also hands defence lawyers an argument that the prosecutor had no standing to charge anyone. Blanche may be right that the president can fire a judge-appointed US attorney. But winning that point leaves the Seattle office being run by someone the Senate hasn’t confirmed and the courts have already declined to appoint and that’s a question that tends to surface later, in someone else’s trial.
