Left inset: Roger Rogoff speaks in an interview about his firing on July 15, 2026 (KING5). Main image: President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio attend a news conference during the NATO Summit at the Presidential Complex in Ankara, Türkiye, on July 8, 2026. NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an international political and military alliance whose members pledge to defend one another against threats. This year’s NATO Summit is being held in Ankara, alongside the NATO Public Forum and the NATO Summit Defense Industry Forum. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via AP).
The U.S. Department of Justice asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday to overturn a lower-court ruling and permit President Donald Trump to remove a federal prosecutor in Washington state. The prosecutor had been appointed to serve as U.S. attorney, but not by Trump, who is both the 45th and 47th president.
The dispute began after a panel of district court judges unanimously selected Roger Rogoff to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington. Rogoff, a veteran Seattle prosecutor, was chosen to fill a vacancy that Trump had not acted on. Within an hour, Trump sent an email dismissing him and rejecting the judges’ selection.
In a 24-page complaint filed in July, attorneys for Rogoff argued that the president’s “purported firing” of their client “was unlawful.”
Earlier this month, Chief U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled for Rogoff. Bastian said federal law does not give the president the “authority to remove executive officers that he has not appointed.”
The Justice Department promptly appealed. The government laid out its position in a 67-page brief filed Friday.
The DOJ presents the case as a major test of the scope and limits of presidential executive authority.
“The question in this case is whether the United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington—that is, the Executive official most immediately responsible for prosecuting federal crimes and defending claims against the United States in a district that encompasses millions of people and one of the Nation’s most prominent cities—must be subject to supervision and removal by the President of the United States,” the brief states. “In the district court’s view, the answer is no.”
The government argues that the lower court misread the law.
“The district court’s injunction is indefensible and warrants immediate reversal,” the brief says. “To begin, the district court’s order flatly contradicts the governing statute. Congress provided that ‘[e]ach United States attorney is subject to removal by the President,’ without limitation.”
Bastian, however, interpreted that provision more narrowly. He said it applies to U.S. attorneys who take office through the standard nomination and Senate confirmation process.
Because Rogoff’s appointment bypassed that confirmation procedure, Bastian concluded that Trump’s removal authority does not extend to him.
The Justice Department strongly rejected that reasoning in its appellate filing:
The district court side-stepped [the removal statute’s] clear language and reasoned instead that construing the statute to nullify the President’s removal authority for court-appointed U.S. Attorneys better serves the “incentive[s]…created by the Constitution and the statutory framework.” But the district court had no license to subordinate the unambiguous statutory text to the court’s own notions of the statute’s purpose.
The DOJ also argued that the district court should have interpreted the statute in a way that avoided serious constitutional questions, invoking the legal principle known as constitutional avoidance.
“It was the court’s obligation to ‘construe the statute to avoid’ ‘serious constitutional problems,’ not to conjure constructions that run headlong into separation-of-powers concerns,” the brief states.
The department nevertheless maintains that the Constitution itself supports the president’s claimed power to remove Rogoff.
“The President must have authority to remove U.S. Attorneys under Article II,” the filing says. “The Supreme Court has made clear that all ‘[s]ubordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him.’ U.S. Attorneys are plainly executive officers because they exercise the President’s ‘conclusive and preclusive’ authority to ‘investigate and prosecute’ crimes, and they do so for their entire district.”
The DOJ expanded on that constitutional argument in its brief:
[T]he Court can reverse on statutory grounds alone. But if more were needed, the district court’s injunction contravenes at least a century of Supreme Court precedent. Enforcing the criminal laws of the United States is a quintessential executive function, and it is the President who is accountable in our constitutional order for all exercises of executive power.
The DOJ argues the upshot of Bastian’s ruling is giving the Senate “an effective veto” over any potential removal of Rogoff.
“No one thinks Congress could validly enact a statute establishing the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle as a constitutional island uniquely independent of oversight by the President (or anyone else),” the brief goes on. “Yet that is not merely the effect, but the avowed purpose of the district court’s injunction. Even if Rogoff were to engage in gross prosecutorial misconduct or flout the Attorney General’s policy directives, the President’s only recourse under the district court’s view would be to lobby the Senate to confirm a permanent replacement.”
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