A panel of 17 federal judges in Washington State decided they knew better than the President of the United States. They rejected Trump's nominee for U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Washington, Neil Floyd, and installed their own pick — former judge and veteran prosecutor Roger Rogoff — instead. Rogoff took the oath of office on July 15, 2026.
Trump fired him in less than an hour.
What followed was a legal circus that ended exactly where anyone paying attention knew it would. U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian, the Chief Judge in Yakima, ruled that Rogoff was the "rightful holder" of the office and ordered him reinstated. Bastian's reasoning hinged on a creative reading of the statute, arguing that the law governing judicial-panel appointments doesn't explicitly say the president can fire the appointee. "It does not say 'until the president fires the person selected,'" Bastian wrote, as if the absence of a specific sentence overrides two centuries of executive authority.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — yes, that Ninth Circuit — disagreed. The court granted an emergency stay, keeping Rogoff out of the office pending a final decision. The same appellate court that spent years as a speed bump for Trump's first-term agenda looked at a district judge trying to strip the president's firing authority and said no.
Bastian's logic deserved the reversal it got. His argument was essentially that because the statute doesn't use the exact words "the president may fire this person," the firing power doesn't exist. By that standard, the Constitution doesn't explicitly say the president can fire his own Cabinet secretaries either — and yet somehow we've managed to operate a republic for 250 years without a judicial panel stepping in to overrule every personnel decision.
The 17-judge panel that started this had their own candidate rejected by the White House and responded by trying to dictate who runs a federal prosecutor's office. That's not how the appointment power works. The president nominates. The Senate confirms. When vacancies arise and interim appointments are needed, the executive branch fills them. Judges don't get to audition their friends for the role and then run to a sympathetic colleague when the president says no.
The question was never whether Rogoff could do the job. The question was whether a panel of judges gets to override the president's choice for who runs a U.S. Attorney's office. The Ninth Circuit's emergency stay answers that question clearly enough.
This marks another instance of lower courts attempting to carve out new limits on presidential authority, only to get checked by the appellate system.
The emergency stay means Rogoff remains out while the case proceeds. The Ninth Circuit will eventually rule on the merits. But the fact that this particular court — with this particular reputation — saw fit to intervene on Trump's behalf tells you everything about how weak the district court's position was.