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Trump fires U.S. attorney in Washington on heels of court appointment

▶ Watch Video: U.S. attorney who served for less than an hour suing Trump administration over firing

Washington — President Trump on Wednesday fired Roger Rogoff from his post as the top federal prosecutor in Seattle shortly after federal judges in the area installed him in the role.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Rogoff’s firing in a social media post and accused the judges serving on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, who had appointed Rogoff as U.S. attorney, of failing to consult with the administration before making their selection.

“District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and POTUS can fire them. 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,” he wrote on X. “Roger Rogoff has been fired by the President.”

Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, criticized Mr. Trump for the firing.

“Roger Rogoff is eminently qualified — throughout his career, he has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to public service, and he was appointed legally by the federal judges in the Western District of Washington,” she said in a statement. “He should have never been fired, but the president wants to appoint an out-of-touch extremist who will put Trump over the rule of law.”

Murray accused the Trump administration of attempting to bypass the Senate’s advice-and-consent role to “install cronies to carry out a corrupt political agenda.”

“The people of Washington state deserve someone in this role who will enforce the law fairly and responsibly — not some Trump administration sock puppet,” she said. 

Blanche’s announcement came soon after judges in the Western District of Washington issued an order appointing Rogoff as U.S. attorney. They highlighted Rogoff’s “deep ties” to the region and said he has “devoted his career to serving its citizens,” including as a local and federal prosecutor, judge on the King County Superior Court and as director of the Washington State Office of Independent Investigation.

The Western District of Washington has not had a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney since mid-2023, in the Biden administration. After Mr. Trump took office in January 2025, he fired Tessa Gorman as U.S. attorney, who had been serving temporarily before the district judges appointed her to the post in May 2024.

Mr. Trump has not yet announced a nominee to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle. The district court announced in January that it would exercise its authority under a federal law governing U.S. attorney vacancies to appoint one.

The office is currently led by Charles Neil Floyd, the first assistant U.S. attorney. Floyd had been tapped as interim U.S. attorney in October but a 120-day clock on his appointment ended in February.

Rogoff is the latest victim of the Trump administration’s ongoing standoff with federal district courts in several states who have exercised their authority to appoint a U.S. attorney until a vacancy is filled, only for their picks to be fired by the president soon after. 

Federal law allows the attorney general to appoint an interim U.S. attorney, who is subject to a 120-day term. Once that appointment expires, though, the district court can either agree to extend that prosecutor’s tenure or appoint its own U.S. attorney until the Senate confirms a replacement.

Federal judges have exercised this power to install U.S. attorneys in several areas, including in Virginia, New Jersey, New York and Nevada.

In those cases, the Trump administration had tapped key allies as interim U.S. attorneys, including Alina Habba, who was Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, in New Jersey and John Sarcone in Albany, New York. But the judges in those districts declined to keep them in the roles and instead named their own U.S. attorneys to serve. In response, the president fired those replacements and, in some cases, maneuvered to keep his original picks — like Habba and Sarcone — in place under a different federal law.

But federal judges have said those acting U.S. attorneys put in place by the Trump administration in New York, Nevada, New Jersey and Virginia were unlawfully appointed. At least one federal appeals court has ruled against Mr. Trump and agreed with a lower court that Habba was serving as acting U.S. attorney unlawfully. Several other appeals courts are considering the legality of the appointments of top federal prosecutors in their areas.

In a case involving Lindsey Halligan, who was appointed interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and had also been a personal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump, a federal judge dismissed criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James after concluding that Halligan’s appointment as U.S. attorney was invalid. The Justice Department has appealed that decision. 

What is China’s Kimi K3 and why is the US so rattled by it?

Hong Kong (CNN) — Remember DeepSeek? The Chinese artificial intelligence startup that rattled the US tech industry with its model that nearly matched leading rivals, trained at a fraction of the cost.China may have done it again.The latest Chinese AI model making waves was developed by a lesser-known startup called Moonshot AI. In just two days after launch, Moonshot suspended new subscriptions after demand overwhelmed its computing capacity.The unexpected enthusiasm for Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model stems from its ability to match – and in some cases outperform – its most advanced US competitors, such as the latest iterations of OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude, for free.Now its rise is intensifying an already contentious race between the US and China to dominate cutting-edge AI. Washington has ramped up export restrictions against China in recent years to slow the country’s development of AI and chips that could power its military.After Kimi K3 was released, US officials and Anthropic have again accused Moonshot of distilling American models, a technique in which one AI model is trained using outputs from another. Moonshot has denied the allegations.Still, the fears spreading among US companies and government officials underscore the stakes of the AI rivalry, and its far-reaching implications for economy, defense and national security.More broadly, Kimi K3’s capabilities are renewing questions about the effectiveness of Washington’s tech export curbs. The new model also challenges an industry belief that leading-edge AI requires heavy spending on data centers and the advanced chips that the US has restricted access to.Unlike most American proprietary models, Kimi K3 was released as an open-weight model. That allows developers to download it, modify it, and run it on their own servers for free, positioning it for easier adoption and a wider market globally.Constrained by limited access to AI hardware and investment compared with American firms, China has embraced so-called “open” models, in contrast to US rivals that mostly sit behind paid subscriptions.“Many organisations value the ability to self-host open models, allowing them to retain the weight and control over sensitive data instead of relying solely on closed-model providers,” said Chelsey Tam, senior equity analyst at financial services firm Morningstar.Who is behind China’s latest AI breakthrough?Moonshot AI was founded three years ago by Yang Zhilin, a promising software engineer in his early 30s from China’s Southeastern city of Shantou.He demonstrated potential early on when studying at Tsinghua University, China’s most elite engineering school, under Tang Jie, a professor who would go on to found another prominent AI startup Z.ai in 2019.“He is the most talented and exceptional student I’ve encountered in recent years,” Tang said while recommending Yang for a scholarship in 2014.Yang went to Carnegie Mellon University for his PhD in computer science at under Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a former AI executive at Meta and Apple. By the end of his studies, Salakhutdinov recalled, Yang turned down a job offer by a senior Apple executive who reported directly to Tim Cook.“I remember him telling me that if he didn’t at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I respect that, and he was right,” Salakhutdinov said in a post on X.Yang later said the decision came down to two things. “First was the environment. We saw tremendous opportunities, from government and venture-capital support to the advances China had made in education over the past few decades, all of which created favorable conditions for AI startups,” he told state-run media in 2024. “Second, we believed AI represented a massive opportunity.”Yang stood out in China’s AI industry not only for founding Moonshot at the age of 32, making him one of the country’s youngest AI entrepreneurs, but also for choosing to return to China to launch his venture.From the start, Yang had grand ambitions. He told a podcast in 2024 that the startup’s name was a nod to his favorite album by British rock band Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon,” in the hope that it would “accomplish something that would create enormous value but would also be extremely difficult — much like landing on the moon.”Moonshot quickly reached national fame after releasing its first Kimi model – named after Yang’s English name – in 2023. That same year, Moonshot secured nearly $300 million in its first two funding rounds, according to a 2024 interview with Chinese media.Is it another ‘DeepSeek moment’?The international attention that Kimi K3’s has garnered echoes the rise of DeepSeek in early 2025, when its R1 reasoning model sent shockwaves through the global AI community.This time, K3 delivered performance approaching frontier systems such as OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 on various benchmarks, further narrowing the gap between Chinese and American AI models.But analysts say Moonshot’s achievement should be viewed through a different lens.DeepSeek challenged the conventional wisdom that developing an advanced AI model requires massive financial investment and vast computing power, and offered competitive pricing.But K3’s discount to frontier models is much smaller than R1’s was at launch, suggesting its cost advantage may be less significant than DeepSeek’s, according to Ivan Su, director at Morningstar.What K3 demonstrates is that Chinese companies are continuing to build on the success of DeepSeek, and close the gap between Chinese and US AI models, said Poe Zhao, analyst and founder of the newsletter Hello China Tech.“Its broader significance is that DeepSeek increasingly looks like the beginning of a pattern,” he said. “DeepSeek was a surprise. K3 is evidence that China’s progress is becoming more repeatable.”Since DeepSeek, Chinese AI firms like Moonshot, Alibaba and Z.ai are getting more attention for each new model, with the pace of the rollouts speeding up.With K3, Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at market analysis firm Counterpoint Research, said the general gap between Chinese and American models has narrowed to three to six months, though it varies significantly by task.Still, other analysts have expressed reservations toward K3’s true capabilities.“While K3 constitutes progress, we’d hesitate to ascribe it near-parity with American frontier models, such as Fable 5, in real-world tasks,” said Malik Ahmed Khan, senior equity analyst at Morningstar in a research note last Friday. Many open model developers have optimized software performance around benchmarks for better results in the past, he explained.Is it a threat to the US?For American tech companies, free and comparable Chinese models like K3 threaten to undermine their own products.Leading US AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI have long accused Chinese labs, including Moonshot, DeepSeek and Alibaba, of extracting capabilities from their models. Those claims have intensified with the arrival of K3.Huang Zhenxin, Moonshot AI’s head of enterprise business, denied the accusations of distillation in an interview with state-run media on Monday.But that has not stopped new allegations from Washington.“We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” said Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a Wednesday post on X. “Large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable.”Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s policy head, echoed Kratsios in an X post that accused Moonshot of engaging in “IP theft and industrial espionage,” calling it a “national challenge that creates serious national security risks.”CNN has reached out to Moonshot for comment.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also reiterated Wednesday that the US could sanction Chinese firms over such IP theft, without mentioning Moonshot or others by name.“When PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table,” he said on X, referring to the country’s formal name People’s Republic of China.Most analysts, however, found the distillation accusation against Moonshot unlikely.Sun of Counterpoint said Moonshot would not have had enough time to train its AI model with its rivals’ latest models, which had limited availability before K3’s launch. And distillation alone would not account for Kimi K3’s outperformance, she added.“The timeline is unconvincing,” she said.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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