Petty Trump Fires Top Prosecutor Minutes After His Appointment

Politics admin July 16, 2026 0 Comments

Petty Trump Fires Top Prosecutor Minutes After His Appointment

President Donald Trump fired a unanimously appointed U.S. attorney less than an hour after he was installed in a bid to keep his own unconfirmed pick as Seattle’s top prosecutor.

The president has spent his second term in office attempting to put loyalists in charge of federal prosecutors’ offices nationwide, though several of them—including his former personal attorney, Alina Habba, and adviser, Lindsey Halligan—have been forced to step down after failing to secure enough support to survive the Senate confirmation process.

Under federal law, interim U.S. attorneys can only serve for 120 days. If the appointment expires before a presidential nominee is confirmed, the judges in a federal district have the power to name a new U.S. attorney.

A bipartisan panel of judges in the Western District of Washington unanimously chose Roger Rogoff, a former judge and veteran prosecutor, to take over after the term of Trump’s interim U.S. attorney, Charles Neil Floyd, expired in February.

Rogoff was sworn in at about 8 a.m. Wednesday, and then went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to meet with Floyd, the AP reported. While he waited in the lobby, the Trump administration emailed him to say he’d been fired.

The move was the latest example of how Trump’s Department of Justice has resorted to using questionable personnel tactics to bypass the Senate and keep unconfirmed top prosecutors in their positions indefinitely, according to the AP.

Trump named Floyd interim U.S. attorney in October but never forwarded his nomination to Congress.

When Floyd’s term expired in February, the administration simply changed his title from U.S. attorney to first assistant U.S. attorney and kept the top position empty, a maneuver whose legality was questioned by a federal appeals court in May.

In the meantime, federal judges in Washington state had begun a public job search for Floyd’s replacement.

On Wednesday, the 17-member panel of judges appointed by five presidents announced its unanimous order appointing Rogoff to the position.

He knew he might be fired immediately—his tenure lasted 54 minutes in all—and has retained an employment law firm to explore the possibility of suing over his removal, according to The New York Times.

In fact, one of the questions the judges asked applicants was how they would respond to being fired, since the administration had previously dismissed other court-appointed U.S. attorneys in Virginia and New York.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defended Rogoff’s ousting in a statement on X.

“District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and POTUS can fire them,” he wrote. Washington’s 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.”

Rogoff told the Times that the job of U.S. attorney was to “carry out the priorities of the administration” and that Trump’s high-level priorities of combating illegal immigration, human trafficking, and gang activity were “pretty normal.”

But he ripped into the administration’s practice of cutting the Senate out of the confirmation process.

“Morale breaks down in each office,” he said. “The ability to do the work breaks down. The ability for the work to be respected—and to be credible with judges and defense attorneys and victims and defendants—is hurt. So, it’s just not a way to run an office, and by the way, it’s also unconstitutional.”