Trump Fires U.S. Attorney After 54 Minutes, Replaces Him With Fake Prosecutor

Roger Rogoff was the United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington for 54 minutes.

Rogoff was sworn in just before 8 a.m. Wednesday in federal court in downtown Seattle. He went to the U.S. Attorney’s office to meet the man he had just legally replaced—temporary selectman Charles Neil Floyd, who was not only never confirmed by the Senate, but nor nominated for this job. Floyd’s term as an interim appointee is regularly limited to 120 days, and with no future legal replacement from the Trump administration, the district judges exercised their legal right to choose a successor to keep the federal criminal justice system running.

While Rogoff was waiting, an email arrived from the Trump administration informing him that it had been removed.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went to X — because all serious and professional business is conducted on a dedicated website racial slurs AND computer generated child pornography – to explain the situation:

District court judges can appoint an interim US attorney and the POTUS can fire them. WDWA judges abandoned the process of consulting the administration so that the elected US attorney would qualify to serve on the administration. Roger Rogoff has been fired by the President.

You don’t need me to tell you this is stupid, but since I’m here: this is stupid.

There is no “time-honored” consultation process because courts have the power to appoint a US attorney only when the administration has completely abdicated its responsibility to fulfill the role. Indeed, if the administration can influence this decision, it defeats the purpose of the law. The statutory scheme assumes that the president is dutifully sending nominations to the Senate, and if they fail—and exceed the temporary nomination window—the courts step in until the president CAN find a confirmable nominee. The purpose of this regime is to ensure that federal criminal prosecutions can proceed without upsetting the constitutional apple cart: the separation of powers separating the roles between the president and the Senate is respected and, if broken, nor branches grabs the power to name someone while that battle is raging.

And for any critics who want to scream into the wind that presidents deserve prosecutors who won’t undermine the administration, the court seated a bipartisan merit selection panel to review the nominees, and all 17 active and senior circuit judges — appointed by five different presidents — unanimously signed the order appointing Rogoff.

For the record, the administration’s contribution to this “time-honored process of consultation” was a March social media post warning Western Washington judges that whoever they chose would “experience the same fate asOther prosecutors appointed by the court who were dismissed by the administration. So even if you believed there was an obligation to “consult,” Blanche couldn’t help but excoriate the administration’s claim to good faith.

Trump wants to install prosecutors illegally and indefinitely without Senate approval.

The problem, like many others, stems from naïve textualism. Section 541(c) states “Every United States attorney is subject to removal by the President.” That said, § 541 only speaks to duly appointed and confirmed US attorneys – it does not speak to the situation at hand, which is covered elsewhere in the code. or OLC Opinion 1979 raised the question of first impression whether § 541(c) would allow a president to fire a court-appointed attorney and concluded that it did. Which makes some sense in the ordinary course of events—if the president and Senate then found a confirmable replacement, the president should be able to remove the court’s appointment in favor of the duly appointed officer. But, again, the legislature that wrote this text assumed that everyone was acting in good faith.

It would shock them to learn that a future president would hand the DOJ over to his personal attorney to use this language to permanently prevent the courts from installing a US attorney over a friend who claims to be acting as US attorney without legal authority.

So the law allows Trump to “fire” a court-appointed US attorney. Firing them in violation of the rest of § 541 is much more problematic. In that case, the administration appointed Floyd to the new role of first assistant U.S. Attorney when his term ended in February, meaning he automatically takes over after Rogoff is fired. And then, POOF! The 120-day limit on temporary appointments is circumvented by taking the same person legally barred from holding the job and giving him the job – but, like, another way!

Lest there be any nasty confusion that Congress had no intention of giving presidents the power to endlessly appoint unconfirmed people to the job, they made it abundantly clear in 2007. Because in 2006, an amendment to the Patriot Act allowed interim Attorney General appointees to serve indefinitelywhich Bush’s DOJ used to exchange nine US attorneys. A year later, Congress repealed the amendment.

But to be clear, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney didn’t even think they could do this without changing the lawand they thought they could kidnap people in offshore torture chambers without legal approval.

Rogoff is talking to lawyers about suing. It’s not clear whether Rogoff has a case that he can’t be impeached, but that doesn’t mean Trump’s US President game has a legal leg to stand on.

This continues to be debated and the administration continues to lose. The real problem is that a fake appointment invalidates all cases coming out of that office. In December, the Third Circuit held 3-0 that the assistant’s first maneuver violated the vacancy law and disqualified Alina Habba. Lindsey Halligan lost his fake job as a prosecutorwith a judge noting that she had no more authority than any private citizen off the street, after the defendants contested their indictments. In Nevada, where Signal chatah played the same play, the judge wrote that the purpose of the Vacancies Act “would be defeated if the Executive Branch—the very branch Congress was trying to limit—could pick whoever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and fill the vacancy simply by declaring that person first assistant.” A court found Bill Essay illegally serving in Los Angeles. In May, all three judges of a Second Circuit panel signaled they weren’t buying that either for false appointment in the Northern District of New York, John Sarcone III.

Under ordinary circumstances, Rogoff is a layup for the job. for court orderRogoff was a King County prosecutor, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the newly transferred Seattle office, a King County Superior Court judge and director of the state office built to independently investigate police killings. He studied trial advocacy at UW Law. He did a stint as assistant general counsel at Microsoft. But his resume is not the issue, because the Trump administration sees competence as less important than — if not a barrier to — loyalty.

The cost is a justice system that works. Because indictments signed by an illegal appointee are not valid – this is how these stories of prosecutor Temu end. They keep the job until some really dangerous criminal figures out they can walk because the Trump panel that signed the documents isn’t legally appointed and then they resign and the DOJ issues another Musk-o-gram on X about how it’s all the Democrat judges’ fault without ever mentioning that the Republican judges are ruling the exact same way.

The Trump DOJ is literally trading “law and order” for friendship.

Earlier: DOJ Fires Litigation Over Improper Request for Competent US Attorneys

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking like a lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions or comments. Follow him Twitter OR Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics and a healthy dose of college sports news.