Roger Rogoff walked into the U.S. Attorney's Office in downtown Seattle on Wednesday morning as the newly sworn chief federal prosecutor for the Western District of Washington. He asked to meet with the man he was replacing. Before that meeting could happen, an email landed in his inbox: President Trump had fired him. The entire tenure lasted 54 minutes.
The rapid-fire removal is the latest, and most dramatic, flashpoint in a running conflict between the Trump administration and federal judges over who controls U.S. attorney vacancies when the Senate confirmation process stalls. It is a fight the administration appears determined to win, and one where the legal ground beneath both sides remains unsettled.
Rogoff, 57, spent two decades as a state prosecutor and six years as a federal prosecutor before serving as a King County Superior Court judge. All 17 active and senior federal judges in the Western District of Washington, appointed by five different presidents, 10 by Democrats and seven by Republicans, unanimously selected him to fill the vacancy after opening a formal application process.
Federal law gives the attorney general 120 days to install an interim U.S. attorney. If that window closes without a Senate-confirmed nominee in place, the district's judges may appoint someone to serve until the vacancy is filled. The administration's preferred candidate, Charles Neil Floyd, had been serving as interim U.S. attorney, but his 120-day term expired back in February. The administration never sent Floyd's nomination to the Senate. Instead, it shifted him to a "first assistant" title and left the top job officially vacant.
That maneuver is what triggered the judges' decision to act. And the administration's response was swift.
Rogoff was sworn in at the federal courthouse before 8 a.m. local time. He then walked to the U.S. Attorney's Office and asked to see Floyd. While he waited in the lobby, the email arrived. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was simultaneously testifying at his own Senate confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill, posted the news on X.
"District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and POTUS can fire them. WDWA judges abandoned the time-honored process of consultation with the administration so that the selected U.S. Attorney is qualified to serve in the administration. Roger Rogoff has been fired by the President."
That post went up while Blanche sat before senators who were questioning him about his independence and fitness to lead the Justice Department. He was scheduled to return for a second day of testimony on Thursday, and Rogoff's firing figured to be a topic.
The administration's position is straightforward: the president has the constitutional authority to remove executive-branch officers, including U.S. attorneys, regardless of how they were appointed. Blanche's X post framed the issue as a matter of executive prerogative, not judicial overreach.
But the pattern of events tells a more complicated story. The administration did not submit Floyd's name for Senate confirmation. It kept him in place under a workaround title after his interim authority expired. When judges exercised the statutory power Congress gave them for exactly this situation, the administration fired their appointee within the hour.
This is not an isolated episode. The Washington Examiner reported that similar firings of court-appointed U.S. attorneys have occurred in Virginia and northern New York. 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.
Those cases cut against the administration, courts found that its own personnel maneuvers, not the judges' appointments, were the ones lacking legal footing.
Sen. Patty Murray, the Washington Democrat who had opposed Floyd for the U.S. attorney post, issued a statement defending Rogoff and attacking the administration's motives.
"Throughout his career, he has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to public service, and he was appointed legally by the federal judges in the Western District of Washington. 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 outrage is politically convenient, but it papers over her own role in the standoff. The Senate's "advise and consent" power is not a veto. When senators from the president's opposing party use procedural tools to block nominees indefinitely, not because the nominees are unqualified, but because they don't want the administration's agenda enforced, they create the very vacancies that produce these fights. The administration has argued that Senate Democrats have obstructed its nominees in a narrowly held chamber, forcing it to rely on acting titles and interim appointments to keep federal law enforcement functioning.
That argument has real weight. A president who cannot staff his own Justice Department cannot execute the laws Congress passed. But the remedy matters. Keeping unconfirmed prosecutors in place through creative title changes, then firing anyone the courts appoint under the statute Congress wrote for this exact scenario, is a strategy that invites the very legal chaos the administration says it wants to avoid.
Rogoff has retained an employment law firm and is considering a legal challenge to his removal. He told The New York Times that the situation damages the credibility of the Justice Department itself.
"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 called the U.S. attorney post "the best job there is" and said the unanimous backing of the 17-judge panel was "really humbling and amazing." Rogoff noted that most of those judges had watched his career firsthand, he had spent years appearing before them, trying cases against their other appointees, and working alongside them in the federal system.
Whether his legal challenge succeeds will depend on a question no court has definitively resolved in this context: can the president fire a U.S. attorney appointed by judges under the federal vacancy statute, or does that statute create a limited appointment that only the court can revoke? The administration says the answer is obvious. Rogoff's lawyers apparently think otherwise.
What gets lost in the procedural combat is the actual work of federal prosecution. The Western District of Washington covers Seattle, one of the cities most affected by drug trafficking, homelessness-related crime, and border-adjacent smuggling operations. Every day the U.S. attorney's chair is empty or occupied by someone whose authority is in legal limbo is a day that federal cases, against drug dealers, fraudsters, violent criminals, risk being challenged, delayed, or thrown out entirely.
The Virginia example is instructive. Halligan's appointment was found unlawful, and the indictments she brought were dismissed. That is not a win for law enforcement. That is a gift to defendants and their lawyers.
The administration has every right to want its own people in these jobs. Presidents of both parties have fought for that control. But the mechanism matters. If the workaround is to leave positions vacant, block the statutory fallback, and cycle through acting officials whose authority courts keep striking down, the result is not executive power, it is prosecutorial dysfunction.
Senate Democrats share the blame for dragging out confirmations. But the administration controls whether it submits nominations. Floyd's name never went to the Senate. The 120-day clock ran out. The judges did what the law told them to do. And the administration fired the result before the man could sit down at his desk.
Blanche's confirmation hearing continues. Rogoff's lawyers are weighing their options. Floyd presumably remains as first assistant U.S. attorney, running the office without the title or the confirmed authority of the top job. The 17 judges who appointed Rogoff have not publicly responded to his firing.
Several open questions remain. What specific legal theory will Rogoff's attorneys pursue? Will the administration finally submit Floyd's nomination to the Senate? And will courts in other districts continue to strike down the administration's personnel workarounds, as they did in New Jersey and Virginia?
The answers will shape not just this one office but the broader question of how the federal government staffs its prosecutors when the confirmation process breaks down.
Everyone involved, the White House, the Senate, the courts, claims to be defending the rule of law. But a system where a veteran prosecutor gets sworn in at sunrise and fired by email before he can pour his first cup of coffee is not a system that inspires much confidence in any of them.
