James Hundley took the oath of office as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on Friday. Hours later, the Department of Justice fired him.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the move on social media with characteristic bluntness:
"Here we go again. [Eastern District of Virginia] judges do not pick our US Attorney. POTUS does. James Hundley, you're fired!"
The clash is straightforward: federal judges in the Eastern District appointed Hundley to fill the vacancy. The DOJ says that's not their call. This is the second time the department has sacked a prosecutor installed by judges, and the pattern reveals a deeper constitutional question that the federal bench seems intent on forcing into the open.
The seat opened because of Lindsey Halligan's troubled tenure. Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Halligan, a former personal lawyer to President Trump, to a 120-day interim term. But Judge Cameron McGowan Currie issued a November 24 ruling finding that the attorney general is only permitted one 120-day appointment in a particular U.S. attorney's office and that Halligan's appointment was illegal from the start.
Currie went further: the indictments Halligan brought against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were invalid. Halligan departed in January 2026, and the judge made clear that the next U.S. Attorney would either need to be chosen by judges or advanced as a permanent, Senate-confirmed candidate.
The judges chose. They picked Hundley, a veteran with 35 years of litigation experience who graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1989 and served six years as a prosecutor in Fairfax County. Chief Judge Hannah Lauck penned the order describing his background. On paper, he was a serious pick, not a political provocateur, not a placeholder.
None of that mattered.
The underlying dispute is about appointment power. A federal statute authorizes judges to fill U.S. attorney vacancies. The executive branch maintains that the president's authority to hire and fire principal officers is not something Congress can route around through the judiciary.
Hundley, for his part, kept his statement measured:
"It was a great honor to be appointed by the Court. I've been practicing law in Virginia for many years and have always held the Court and the United States Attorney's Office in the highest regard. I would have welcomed the opportunity to support the attorneys and the staff of this outstanding Office as well as the law enforcement officers they work with."
"The difficult work they do on a daily basis to protect our community is critically important. Despite my dismissal by the President, I will continue to support our country and its justice system in any way I can."
Gracious words. But they don't resolve the structural question, and neither does firing him.
This is the second round of this fight. Last week, the White House dismissed Donald Kinsella, an interim U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York who had also been chosen by judges on that bench. Kinsella replaced John Sarcone III, a Trump ally who had been deemed to be serving in the position unlawfully.
Kinsella told Law.com on Thursday that he had no interest in making himself the story:
"It's not important what my position is. It's not about me. There's a statute that authorizes the judges to fill the position, and the president hasn't nominated anyone. The judges decided that they wanted to fill the position. That's their prerogative. And the White House apparently believes that the president can fire the US attorney, so that's what they did."
"I don't want to get involved in all the controversy."
Too late for that.
Here's what matters: the Eastern District of Virginia still doesn't have a confirmed U.S. Attorney. The Halligan experiment collapsed under its own legal weight. The court's pick lasted a few hours. And the president hasn't nominated a permanent replacement.
Conservatives should be clear-eyed about this. The DOJ is right that the president's appointment authority over principal officers is a core executive power. Federal judges inserting themselves into the selection of prosecutors inverts the constitutional design. Prosecutors answer to the executive, not the judiciary. That principle is worth defending.
But defending the principle means exercising the power. A vacant U.S. attorney's office in one of the most important federal districts in the country, home to the Pentagon, to major national security cases, to a docket that touches the heart of federal law enforcement, is not a sustainable outcome. The judges moved because nobody else did. That's an invitation the administration should close by nominating a qualified, confirmable candidate and sending the name to the Senate.
The Hundley firing wasn't even the biggest legal story of the day. The Supreme Court struck down Trump's sweeping global tariffs in a 6-3 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion:
"The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. IEEPA's grant of authority to 'regulate... importation' falls short. IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties."
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both Trump appointees, voted to invalidate the tariffs. The president responded on Truth Social:
"What happened today with the two United States Supreme Court Justices that I appointed against great opposition, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, whether people like it or not, never seems to happen with Democrats. They vote against the Republicans, and never against themselves, almost every single time, no matter how good a case we have."
Hours after the decision, Trump signed an executive order instituting a new 10 percent global tariff under a new law, which can remain in effect for 150 days without congressional approval. The administration adapted and moved forward, the kind of executive agility that matters more than any single court ruling.
The pattern is now established. Judges appoint interim prosecutors. The DOJ fires them. The offices remain unstaffed at the top. Repeat.
This cycle benefits no one, not the administration, not the courts, and certainly not the career prosecutors and law enforcement officers doing the daily work of federal criminal justice. The Eastern District of Virginia handles cases that matter. Someone needs to run it, and that someone needs to get there through the front door: presidential nomination and Senate confirmation.
The DOJ drew the line on appointment authority. Now it needs to fill the vacancy it's defending.
