A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate Seattle’s court-appointed U.S. attorney Thursday, ruling the president acted unconstitutionally when he abruptly fired him, dealing yet another blow to the administration’s workaround for installing prosecutors without Senate confirmation.
According to Bloomberg News, Judge Stanley Bastian ruled from the bench that Roger Rogoff, a veteran prosecutor selected by Western District of Washington judges to lead the Seattle U.S. attorney’s office, was fired within an hour of his appointment in a move that violated constitutional limits on presidential power. Bastian, an Obama appointee, barred Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office from blocking Rogoff’s access to the position.
The decision sets up an unusually awkward arrangement: Rogoff will now serve under an attorney general who’s publicly opposed his appointment and controls the office’s day-to-day operations.
Bastian pressed DOJ’s attorney hard during the hearing over the purpose of giving courts the power to fill prosecutor vacancies if the president could simply undo it immediately. What, he asked, is the point of that power “if the president can just within an hour terminate the person appointed? Why have the statute?”
Rogoff’s attorney, Hailyn Chen, argued the Constitution’s Appointments Clause was never meant to give presidents unchecked authority to install whoever they want, saying it was intended as a “Guardrail against executive cronyism.”
A DOJ spokesperson confirmed the department plans to fight the ruling. Unless that appeal succeeds, Rogoff will remain in the role until the Senate confirms a permanent replacement, with Trump having already nominated Pete Serrano for the job.
The ruling adds to a growing list of similar court decisions rejecting the administration’s practice of sidestepping Senate confirmation to place favored prosecutors in charge of U.S. attorneys’ offices, particularly in Democratic-leaning states where senators have used their “blue slip” powers to reject a permanent appointment from Trump.
In many such areas, the administration reappointed prosecutors and/or fired court-appointed ones, only for federal courts to rule this was illegal. The most spectacular case of this occurred in the Eastern District of Virginia, where a judge’s determination Lindsey Halligan was illegally appointed resulted in the Justice Department’s prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James being thrown out.
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