Roger Rogoff fired” is already trending in Seattle news today — and for good reason: he held the job for just 54 minutes.
Federal judges in the Western District of Washington swore him in as U.S. attorney at 7:40 a.m. He headed over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office downtown, expecting to meet the man he was replacing and start settling in. Instead, while he was sitting in the lobby waiting, an email showed up on his phone. Subject line: “A Message From the President.” President Trump had fired him.
Rogoff didn’t sound bitter about it afterward. Asked what it was like to hold the job for less than an hour, he told KOMO News it was simply the greatest hour of his life.
It wasn’t exactly a shock, either. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had already warned back in March that any U.S. attorney Western Washington’s judges picked on their own would end up like the other court-appointed prosecutors his administration had pushed out in New Jersey and upstate New York.
Rogoff’s team is reportedly weighing a lawsuit. If they file, it’ll be one of the more direct legal challenges yet to how the administration has been handling these judicial appointments.
Why Roger Rogoff Fired So Quickly Wasn’t a Total Surprise
The Western District hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney since Nicholas Brown resigned back in 2023. Since then it’s just been a rotation of interim picks, most recently Charles Neil Floyd, a former immigration judge Trump installed last October.
Floyd’s nomination never actually went to the Senate. When his 120-day interim term ran out in February, instead of letting the clock trigger a judicial appointment, the administration just renamed his title to “first assistant” and kept him running the office anyway. It’s a maneuver a federal appeals panel has already looked at skeptically. Washington Sen. Patty Murray had also said flatly she’d block Floyd if he were ever actually nominated.
So in January, with no nominee in sight, the district’s judges announced they’d fill the seat themselves. They have that authority under Section 546(d) of federal law once the 120-day appointment window closes — which is exactly what they did Wednesday, naming Rogoff unanimously.
Two very different explanations
Blanche didn’t argue that the judges lacked the legal authority to make the pick. His complaint was that they skipped consulting the administration first, something he called the usual “time-honored process.”
Rogoff sees it the opposite way. The president gets to nominate a U.S. attorney, he said, but only with the Senate’s sign-off — and firing him without any conversation first strikes him as unlawful.
Murray backed the judges’ choice, framing the administration’s approach as a way of dodging the confirmation process rather than following it.
Floyd, for his part, stays right where he was: leading the office’s roughly 85 attorneys and 70 support staff under the “first assistant” title, with still no permanent nominee working its way through Congress.
Whatever happens next in court, Rogoff isn’t coming to this fight as an outsider. He spent 14 years as a King County prosecutor, six more as an assistant U.S. attorney, seven years on the King County Superior Court bench, and most recently ran the state’s first-ever Office of Independent Investigations.Whatever happens next in the Roger Rogoff fired controversy, he isn’t coming to this fight as an outsider.
Sources: NBC News, KOMO News, Bloomberg Law
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