SEATTLE – Roger Rogoff was standing in the lobby of the U.S. attorney’s office here Thursday morning, less than an hour after taking the oath of office, when an email arrived from the Justice Department. The message informed him that he no longer held the position the federal judges of his district had unanimously bestowed on him before dawn. He had, the administration’s communication indicated, been removed by President Trump.
Judges in the Western District of Washington had appointed Rogoff after the Trump administration left the district without a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for more than three years. Federal law permits district court judges to temporarily fill vacant U.S. attorney seats. The district’s bench exercised that authority unanimously on Thursday, selecting Rogoff – a former state judge with 26 years of federal and state prosecutorial experience, according to NBC News – before 8 a.m. He was sworn in at the Seattle federal courthouse. By mid-morning, the appointment was over.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the firing on social media. “District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. attorney, and POTUS can fire them,” Blanche wrote. He added that the district’s judges had “abandoned the time-honored process of consultation” with the administration before making their selection. The statement confirmed both the legality of the appointment and the legality of the firing in the same sentence – an accounting of who held which power under the statute, and who exercised it.
Rogoff, speaking after the termination, described the experience in the only terms that remained available to him. “The fact that the judges of this district believed I was the right person to do this work is just really humbling,” he said. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat, offered a different register. “This administration doesn’t want to deal with advice and consent – they just want to install cronies,” Murray said. She added that Rogoff “should have never been fired.”
Thursday’s sequence was not new. The Trump administration has followed the same pattern in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York: a district court appoints a U.S. attorney to fill a vacancy; the White House removes that person within hours of the appointment. The Western District of Washington had lacked a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney since mid-2023. Rather than send a nominee through the Senate confirmation process, the administration left the seat vacant – and when judges moved to fill it as the law permits, it fired the person they chose before he could review a single file.
Blanche, whose own confirmation as permanent attorney general is unresolved after two days of contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, spent much of those sessions being asked whether he would act as a check on the president’s instincts or as an extension of them. The question senators returned to most often was whether Blanche would remove or sideline officials at Trump’s direction regardless of legal or professional merit. Thursday offered a demonstration, with Blanche announcing the firing on social media rather than through any formal departmental channel.
The statutory framework is not ambiguous. Courts can appoint. Presidents can remove. What remains unsettled is the practical effect of a cycle in which a vacancy is kept open, a court-appointed successor is removed before taking any action, and the vacancy continues. A federal judge last month found that the administration had acted in bad faith in a related DOJ matter and referred Blanche to a state bar association for potential disciplinary proceedings. No court has yet challenged the removal of a court-appointed U.S. attorney directly.
The Western District of Washington handles federal criminal prosecution across the state, immigration enforcement cases, and litigation against federal agencies. None of those functions can proceed in the ordinary way without a functioning U.S. attorney. Cases do not pause for the political dynamics of a succession dispute. Career prosecutors in the office carry the operational load, but the office has operated without confirmed leadership for three years. It will continue to do so.
The administration has not announced a nominee for the Western District. Whether it intends to send one through the Senate, given that the process might produce a candidate Republicans find inconvenient to confirm, is not clear. Murray and other Washington Democrats have called for Senate action, but the chamber’s Republican leadership has not indicated any intention to pressure the White House for a nomination. CBS News reported that the pattern of executive-judicial conflict over appointments has now extended to at least four major districts with no sign of resolution.
Murray’s phrase – “install cronies who will put Trump over the rule of law” – functions as both a political accusation and a structural description. The U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington was meant to enforce federal law impartially, including in cases where the federal government is the defendant. That office is vacant again. What changes, or whether anything does, depends on a process the administration alone controls – and has shown no urgency to move forward.
