The Justice Department fired James Hundley on Friday, hours after federal judges in Virginia's Eastern District appointed the veteran litigator as interim U.S. Attorney without executive branch input. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche made the administration's position unmistakable.
"Here we go again. EDVA judges do not pick our US Attorney. POTUS does. James Hundley, you're fired!"
The clash began after Lindsey Halligan stepped down as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in January, following a ruling that deemed her appointment unlawful. Federal judges then posted an online job application seeking her replacement and, this week, installed Hundley on their own authority.
The Justice Department shut it down the same week.
The sequence of events in Virginia reveals a pattern that has been building for months. According to The Daily Caller, Federal judges have removed Halligan and four other U.S. attorneys from their posts, ruling that their appointments violated the law. Judges in New Jersey, Nevada, and California reached similar conclusions and invalidated those appointments.
Having cleared the seats, the judiciary then moved to fill them. Chief United States District Court Judge M. Hannah Lauck ordered the court clerk to publish a vacancy announcement on the court's website and in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Washington Post, The Virginian-Pilot, and Virginia Lawyers Weekly. A federal statute does allow district courts to name a U.S. attorney temporarily once the attorney general's designation lapses, keeping the position filled until a successor takes office.
That's the legal hook. But the broader picture tells a different story.
U.S. attorneys are prosecutors. They represent the executive branch in federal court. They answer to the Attorney General and, ultimately, to the President. The appointment power exists within Article II for a reason: prosecution is an executive function, and the people who wield it must be accountable to the elected executive.
When federal judges strike down a president's attorney appointments and then appoint replacements of their own choosing, they aren't just interpreting the law. They are collapsing the separation between the branch that judges and the branch that prosecutes. The same courts that ruled the administration's picks were unlawful turned around and installed their own. They became the hiring committee for the office that argues cases before them.
Consider what that means in practice. A U.S. attorney selected by federal judges would prosecute cases in front of those same judges. The person deciding whom to charge and what plea deals to offer would owe their position not to the elected president but to the bench. The conflict is structural, not hypothetical.
Virginia is not an isolated case. Five U.S. attorneys have now been removed by federal judges across multiple districts. Courts in four states have reached similar conclusions about the legality of the administration's appointments. Each removal created a vacancy. Each vacancy created an opportunity for the judiciary to assert control over a fundamentally executive function.
The statutory provision allowing courts to temporarily fill vacancies was designed as a stopgap, a way to keep the lights on when bureaucratic timing left a gap between one confirmed attorney and the next. It was not designed as a mechanism for the judiciary to staff the executive branch after dismantling the president's choices.
There is a difference between a neutral procedural backstop and a power grab dressed in procedural language. The distinction matters.
Blanche's public and immediate response signals that the administration does not intend to let these appointments stand unchallenged. The deputy attorney general did not equivocate, negotiate, or wait for a memo. He fired Hundley publicly and reasserted the president's appointment authority in plain language.
That directness matters. In previous administrations, executive power eroded not through dramatic confrontation but through slow acquiescence. A court would push. The White House would study the question. Months would pass. The new normal would harden. By the time anyone objected, the precedent was set.
This administration responded in hours.
The question of who selects federal prosecutors is not an abstraction for legal academics. It determines which cases get priority, which investigations move forward, and which enforcement policies shape communities. The Eastern District of Virginia handles some of the most consequential federal cases in the country. Control over that office is control over outcomes.
Federal judges have every right to rule on the legality of appointments. That is their role. But ruling and replacing are two different verbs with two very different constitutional implications. One is judicial review. The other is something else entirely.
The bench struck down the president's picks, posted job listings in four newspapers, and installed a replacement of its own selection. The executive branch fired him before the weekend. This fight is not over. It is barely beginning.
