An Obama judge just blocked President Trump from firing Seattle’s court-appointed U.S. attorney, a move critics say defies the Constitution and decades of precedent.
U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian issued a preliminary injunction reinstating Roger Rogoff as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington and ordered the Justice Department to treat him as the rightful officeholder. Fox News Digital reported the order bars the administration from treating Rogoff as lawfully removed and restores his ability to serve.
The ruling lands in a growing fight over who controls federal prosecutors. District judges had appointed Rogoff; the Trump administration moved to remove him. Bastian, first nominated by President Obama in 2013, stepped in and put Rogoff back.
The Washington Examiner reported Bastian ruled Trump could not fire a U.S. attorney the district judges had appointed less than an hour earlier, and ordered the administration not to obstruct Rogoff’s access to office resources in the Western District of Washington.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis rejected the decision in plain terms.
Bis said,
"This is yet another ruling from an activist judge trying to thwart President Trump’s agenda and undermine his constitutional authority. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President,"
The Justice Department’s Rapid Response account stated it disagrees, will seek an immediate stay, and will appeal. That sets up a direct test of presidential removal power against a district judge’s order.
Mike Davis, founder and president of Article III, framed the stakes around separation of powers. He noted Democrat-appointed judges had selected their own U.S. attorney, the president through his attorney general fired him, and Bastian then forced a reversal.
Davis wrote that under Article II the president holds the executive power to fire Justice Department officials. He said Bastian created an unnecessary constitutional crisis by ordering removal of the president’s pick and installing what Davis called the judge’s preferred choice, and that the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court would have to fix it.
Similar appointment fights have already surfaced in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. In New Jersey, federal courts rejected the administration’s effort to keep Alina Habba leading the U.S. attorney’s office after her interim term ended; the judges’ original appointee, Desiree Grace, did not simply take over.
Readers have watched the same pattern when Obama and Biden judges halted White House ballroom construction and the administration vowed a Supreme Court fight.
Jeff Clark, litigation vice president at the Oversight Project, said the president’s power to remove U.S. attorneys must remain unfettered under Article II and predicted Bastian will be reversed at the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court.
Brian Nieves, a partner at Holtzman Vogel, called it judicial overreach and said the judiciary does not get to run the executive branch.
Long-standing precedent undercuts the idea that a district judge can lock a president out of removing a U.S. attorney. In 1926, the Supreme Court in Myers v. United States held that the president generally has constitutional authority to remove executive branch officers, in a case centered on President Woodrow Wilson’s firing of a postmaster without Senate consent.
A 1979 Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion concluded that the president’s statutory authority to remove “each United States attorney” also extends to prosecutors appointed by federal judges. A 2000 federal appeals court ruling reached the same conclusion: the president has authority to fire a U.S. attorney appointed by federal judges.
Those authorities sit on the books while a single district judge in the Seattle-area jurisdiction has now ordered the Justice Department to recognize the court-appointed prosecutor and restore his access. The administration has already signaled it will seek a stay and take the appeal.
That track matches other recent reversals, including when the Supreme Court cleared White House ballroom construction after lower-court blocks.
Critics also flagged a basic quality problem in the order itself. Reporting noted the federal judge’s first name was misspelled in the document, missing the “e” in Stanley. One observer quipped that the misspelling showed the quality of the legal work.
Bastian’s injunction does not end the dispute. It freezes the personnel move, keeps Rogoff in place for now, and forces the Justice Department to litigate its way out. The department has said it will seek an immediate stay and appeal.
The same cycle has appeared in immigration cases. An Obama-appointed judge lifted her own block on Somali TPS termination only after higher-court action, and the Supreme Court has cleared the way for Trump third-country deportations pending full review.
Appeals courts have also stepped in elsewhere. Biden-appointed judges on the First Circuit sided with Trump and reversed lower-court orders that had blocked TPS terminations.
Here the core question is simpler. U.S. attorneys carry out the executive’s law-enforcement agenda. A president who cannot remove them cannot control that agenda. Myers, the 1979 OLC opinion, and the 2000 appeals ruling all treated that removal power as real, including for judge-appointed prosecutors.
Bastian’s order puts a district judge between the president and a federal prosecutor in Seattle. The Justice Department has already said it will fight the ruling. The Ninth Circuit and, if needed, the Supreme Court will decide whether decades of removal authority still mean what they say.
When district judges pick prosecutors and then shield them from the president who must answer for federal law enforcement, voters lose the clear line of accountability the Constitution built into Article II.