Roger Rogoff, the court-appointed U.S. attorney for western Washington who was fired less than an hour after taking the oath of office, has filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's authority to remove him.
Rogoff's complaint, filed Tuesday in federal court, names President Donald Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche as defendants. It asks a judge to reinstate Rogoff as the "validly appointed" top federal prosecutor in Seattle until a successor goes through presidential nomination and Senate confirmation. The lawsuit argues the president lacks the power to nullify a district court's appointment authority under the Constitution's Appointments Clause, a legal question no court has previously been forced to resolve in this context.
The facts of the firing are not in dispute. Rogoff was unanimously appointed by 17 active and senior federal judges in the Western District of Washington to fill a vacancy the administration had left open for months. He was sworn in last Wednesday. Fifty-four minutes later, while still waiting in the lobby of the U.S. attorney's office, he received an email from the White House Presidential Personnel Office informing him he was terminated.
That sequence, oath to pink slip in under an hour, is striking on its own. But the legal dispute underneath it matters far more, because it exposes a gap between the administration's staffing practices and the statutory process Congress wrote for filling U.S. attorney vacancies.
Federal law gives the head of the Justice Department authority to install an interim U.S. attorney for up to 120 days when a vacancy arises. After that window closes, district court judges may appoint someone to serve until the vacancy is permanently filled through Senate confirmation.
In Seattle, the administration installed Neil Floyd, a former immigration judge, as interim lead of the district in October. Floyd was never formally nominated by the president. When his 120-day clock expired, the administration did not send his name to the Senate. Instead, it shifted his title to first assistant U.S. attorney, a maneuver that kept him in a leadership role without triggering the statutory appointment process.
A federal appeals court subsequently questioned the legality of Floyd's continued service, Newsmax reported. That prompted the district's judges to act. All 17 active and senior judges voted unanimously to appoint Rogoff, a 57-year-old career prosecutor with 20 years in state prosecution and six years as a federal prosecutor.
The administration's response was immediate. Within an hour of Rogoff's swearing-in, he was gone.
Acting Attorney General Blanche did not treat the firing as a surprise. AP News reported that Blanche had foreshadowed the move before Rogoff was even selected, warning that candidates without the president's support would "suffer the same fate as others."
After the firing, Blanche posted on the social platform X defending the action. The administration has taken a similar posture in other high-profile removals, asserting broad executive authority over personnel decisions.
The Hill reported Blanche's statement in full:
"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."
A DOJ spokesperson echoed that position, saying the district court "did not coordinate" with the department on Rogoff's selection and calling the firing "wholly within the President's authority."
Rogoff's complaint cuts directly against the DOJ's position. His attorneys argue that by firing a court-appointed U.S. attorney, and by committing to fire anyone else the court appoints without presidential approval, the administration has attempted to override Congress's constitutional design for filling vacancies.
The complaint states:
"By purporting to fire Mr. Rogoff, and apparently committing to firing anyone else a district court appoints without 'the support of POTUS', the President has attempted to negate Congress's exercise of its constitutionally enumerated power."
The lawsuit also warns that allowing the firing to stand would let the administration evade the Senate's advice-and-consent role "indefinitely." That framing highlights the core tension: if the president can fire every court-appointed replacement but never sends a nominee to the Senate, the U.S. attorney's office effectively operates without a confirmed leader for as long as the White House prefers.
Rogoff himself addressed the matter publicly. "The President's actions violate the law, and they ignore the protections of the Constitution of the United States," he said, as Fox News reported. "His removal of me, like his removal of other court-appointed U.S. attorneys across the country, is illegal and cannot stand."
In a separate interview, Rogoff was more blunt about the administration's approach: "I don't think it's the way to run the Department of Justice... it's also unconstitutional," Breitbart reported.
The Western District of Washington is not the first jurisdiction to see a clash over court-appointed prosecutors. Alina Habba, Trump's former personal defense attorney, held a U.S. attorney role under the 3rd Circuit's jurisdiction. In December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit determined Habba had unlawfully remained in the position past her term's expiration date.
Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi selected a trio of prosecutors to replace Habba. Those replacements were also disqualified. The pattern, interim appointees staying past their authorized terms, courts pushing back, and the administration resisting judicial appointments, has repeated across multiple districts.
The administration has shown a willingness to install its preferred officials across agencies, sometimes drawing sharp criticism from Democrats and legal observers. Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat, framed the Rogoff firing as part of a broader pattern. "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 said, as the Washington Examiner reported.
Murray's accusation is a political claim, not a legal finding. But the underlying procedural question is real: the statute gives district courts the power to appoint when the 120-day interim window closes. If the president can fire those appointees at will and never nominate a permanent replacement, the statutory framework becomes a dead letter.
Several questions remain unanswered. No court has yet scheduled a hearing on Rogoff's motion for reinstatement. The specific federal judge assigned to the case has not been publicly identified in available reporting. And the White House has not commented beyond the DOJ spokesperson's statement.
The legal question at the center of the case, whether the president can fire a court-appointed U.S. attorney, has no direct precedent. Fox News described the lawsuit as the first of its kind. The outcome could reshape the balance of power between the executive branch and the judiciary over federal prosecutorial staffing nationwide.
Government firings and their legal consequences have become a recurring theme across the federal workforce. A federal judge recently dismissed a fired Yosemite ranger's lawsuit over a protest-related termination, while the administration has also pulled federal funding from a New York fraud unit over performance failures. Each case turns on different facts, but together they reflect an administration willing to move fast on personnel, and a growing number of legal challenges in response.
Rogoff spent 26 years as a prosecutor before the judges in his district tapped him for the top job. He held it for less than an hour. Whether that firing stands may depend on a question Congress answered in statute decades ago, and that the administration now seems determined to test.
When the law says the courts get to fill the seat, and the executive branch refuses to let anyone sit in it, the vacancy is not an accident. It is a strategy. And strategies built on avoiding Senate confirmation deserve more scrutiny, not less.
