The situation with the Trump administration and being able to appoint the U.S. Attorneys for some districts has been an ongoing imbroglio. Nothing has reached the heights of absurdity that the Alina Habba wrangle had in New Jersey, but then she wasn't the only U.S. Attorney dogfight they were in, either.
This is from last December.
President Donald Trump suffered another loss Monday in his ongoing fight to make his former personal lawyer the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey, with a federal appellate panel upholding a lower court ruling that disqualified Alina Habba from the post.
U.S. Third Circuit Judge D. Michael Fisher, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, said Habba’s continued service in a job she first took in March violates the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and undercuts constitutional protections meant to ensure the three branches of government remain separate but equal.
Fisher barred Habba from the job, affirming U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann’s August ruling, which Brann had put on hold pending appeal. This is a fight the Trump administration has been waging elsewhere in the country, including Virginia and Nevada, so Monday’s precedential ruling promises far-ranging impact.
Fisher noted that the Senate did not act to confirm Habba within the 120 days the Preserving United States Attorney Independence Act requires, triggering a provision in the 2007 law that authorizes federal judges to appoint an interim replacement if the clock runs out without Senate action.
When New Jersey’s federal judges appointed Desiree Leigh Grace in July instead of Habba, Trump administration officials fired her and resorted to a string of maneuvers to keep Habba in the job. Those maneuvers served to “sidestep” the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and statutory requirements reflecting Congress’s intent for someone with “a breadth of experience to properly lead the office,” Fisher wrote.
“It is apparent that the current administration has been frustrated by some of the legal and political barriers to getting its appointees in place,” Fisher wrote. “Its efforts to elevate its preferred candidate for U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, to the role of Acting U.S. Attorney demonstrate the difficulties it has faced — yet the citizens of New Jersey and the loyal employees in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deserve some clarity and stability.”
In Los Angeles, the dynamic Bill Essayli is about the only nominee of those under fire who has still somehow managed to stay afloat in a corner of the country that desperately needs his steady hand and unwavering focus.
And, man - they can't stand this guy.
Across the country, President Trump has installed handpicked loyalists as top federal prosecutors. Several have been pushed out after legal battles because they lack Senate confirmation to serve as U.S. attorneys.
But in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli wields the power of a top prosecutor under a lesser title: “first assistant.”
Essayli clocked his first full year in office this week. He has survived the kinds of challenges that sunk Trump picks in other states through a combination of legal gamesmanship by the U.S. Department of Justice and a lack of action by judges in the Central District of California.
Essayli has used his position to act as one of Trump’s fiercest legal foot soldiers. He has pursued criminal charges against protesters, activists and immigrants while dropping cases involving administration allies and supporting lawsuits over transgender and environmental policies in California.
Another appointment soap opera is playing out in the weird wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.
Back in 2023, the last U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington had been the Biden-nominated and Senate-blessed Nick Brown. He left office that year to successfully run for the state's attorney general's office. His First Assistant U.S. Attorney, Tessa Gorman, automatically became the acting U.S. Attorney. In mid-January 2024, Gorman was then appointed interim U.S. Attorney by Merrick Garland, a position limited by statute to 120 days. She was then appointed by the judge of the Western District Court in Washington to the position until the incoming administration filled the vacancy.
In February 2025, the Trump administration dismissed Gorman, and this is where it gets complicated again, thanks to the difficulty of getting Trump nominees through the Senate.
What the administration had to do with their choice for the office, Charles Neil Floyd, sounds very similar to what they are doing with Bill Essayli in SoCal. Only, in that case, he has an advantage in a dearth of judges to jack the scheme up.
...Following that dismissal, on Oct. 6, 2025, Floyd was sworn in as the interim U.S. attorney, a position that was limited to 120 days by law. Floyd was appointed First Assistant U.S. Attorney on Feb. 2, 2026, and continues to lead around 85 attorneys and 70 support staff in the Criminal and Civil Divisions.
So, much as Essayli in LA, Floyd has been running the U.S. Attorney's office from the second-in-command's billet. What has happened is that, unlike the Los Angeles situation, there is an activist court in the Western District who looked at the office, and said 'there's still a vacancy at the top that there's been no nominee for, so we, by law, get to fill it.'
And so they did, appointing former King County prosecutor and head of investigation, Roger Rogoff, to the office after waiting in vain for a name from the DOJ.
...In January of 2026, the judges of the Western District of Washington announced their intent to fill the vacancy, since Trump still had not nominated someone for consideration by the Senate.
...On Wednesday, Rogoff was appointed by the judges of the Western District of Washington under Section 546(d), which allows a district court to appoint an attorney to serve if a interim appointment expires and a position is left open.
The order, signed by Chief U.S. District Judge David G. Estudillo, said the judges were making the appointment "to ensure the integrity and effective administration of justice in this District."
KING 5 spoke to Rogoff on Wednesday morning, who called the firing, "not unexpected, but disappointing."
"It's for someone who's been a criminal practitioner, it is the highest honor you can probably have in the state," Rogoff told KING 5.
According to Rogoff, the Western District never heard from the Trump Administration leading up to the swearing-in ceremony.
The Western District of Washington’s chief judge appointed Roger Rogoff, a veteran prosecutor and former Democrat-appointed state jurist, to serve as Seattle-area US attorney. https://t.co/oRA6Wrxb6W
— Bloomberg Law (@BLaw) July 15, 2026
Mr. Rogoff was U.S. Attorney for 54 minutes when the 'you're fired' note arrived from Todd Blanche.
The Trump Justice Department dismissed the newly appointed US attorney for western Washington state less than an hour after he was sworn in, setting up yet another legal battle over the president’s appointment powers.
Roger Rogoff, a former King County judge and veteran state and federal prosecutor, was sworn in Wednesday morning at the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle after he was unanimously appointed by the district’s 17 federal judges.
Rogoff told the Associated Press in a phone interview that he then went to the federal prosecutor’s office to request a meeting with first assistant US Attorney Charles Neil Floyd, a former immigration judge who had served as interim US attorney for a 120-day period that ended in February.
U.S. Attorneys, the acting U.S. Attorney General explained, serve at the pleasure of the president.
Thank you for your short service.
...“District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and POTUS can fire them,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on X Wednesday evening. “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. Roger Rogoff has been fired by the President.”
US attorneys must be confirmed by the Senate, except in the case of interim appointments. Once an interim appointment expires after 120 days, federal judges can pick the new US attorney for any district.
The Trump administration fired a Seattle U.S. attorney less than an hour after federal judges appointed him to the job.
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) July 16, 2026
Roger Rogoff, a 57-year-old former King County Superior Court judge and longtime prosecutor, was sworn in before 8 a.m. local time at the federal courthouse in… pic.twitter.com/vdV8w6Q3GI
Obviously, this is setting up for yet another legal battle over who Trump can dump and who he can't, but this one is a little different because Western District Court lawyers went into it with a guy specifically chosen for his willingness to sue the Trump administration if what they believed to be inevitable actually happened. Rogoff has indicated he's thinking about it and has already engaged a legal team.
...Influential lawyers practicing in Western Washington, whose seven active district judges were all appointed by President Joe Biden, were previously strategizing about the need for the court to select someone willing to sue Trump if and when they’re fired. That would be a more aggressive tack than in the Eastern District of Virginia and Northern District of New York, whose ousted court appointees didn’t litigate.
The calls for what would be a risky and contentious legal fight with DOJ headquarters were seen by some Seattle attorneys as necessary during a period when then-Attorney General Pam Bondi was appointing multiple Trump allies without prosecuting experience as temporary US attorneys, bypassing the Senate confirmation process. Whenever judges tried inserting a different US attorney, the White House rapidly fired them.
But since February, the administration’s relations with the judiciary on this issue have cooled down. In March, New Jersey’s chief judge reached an agreement with Blanche on appointing a veteran assistant US attorney in New Jersey to lead the office.
The Seattle developments Wednesday indicate the harmony in New Jersey may have been a one-off.
The administration installed an interim US attorney for Seattle, former immigration judge Charles Neil Floyd, last fall. But he’s since been downgraded to “first assistant” while still heading the office, after surpassing his 120-day maximum term. The judges opted against appointing him after 120 days, and Washington Sen. Patty Murray (D) has said she’d block Floyd if Trump were to nominate him.
But the president’s lack of nomination for anyone to lead the office triggered the court’s action, Western Washington Chief Judge David Estudillo said Wednesday.
These judges could have appointed the president's choice but chose not to, knowing that their own senator had vowed to block him at her level if Floyd were officially nominated.
So what they did, and all quite above board, was install their own guy, and counting it as a win on either front.
If the administration did nothing, it worked out.
If Blanche followed through on his threat...
These candidates do not have the support of POTUS, and I expect they will suffer the same fate as others have when judges ignore Article II. https://t.co/FC0cOVyQ4h
— Acting AG Todd Blanche (@DAGToddBlanche) March 26, 2026
...then they had the guy who would sue to keep his job, which had been the plan all along.
And here we go again.
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