The Justice Department fired James Hundley on Friday, just moments after judges in the Eastern District of Virginia unanimously chose him to serve as interim U.S. attorney. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the move on social media with characteristic bluntness. "EDVA judges do not pick our US Attorney. POTUS does. James Hundley, you're fired!"
The message was short. The principle behind it was not.
Hundley, a lawyer who has handled criminal and civil cases for more than 30 years, didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday evening. His tenure as the judges' pick lasted barely long enough to register.
This is a fight about constitutional authority dressed up as a personnel dispute. The law says that district courts may choose U.S. attorneys when an initial appointment expires. The Trump administration has insisted that the power lies only in the hands of the executive branch. Both sides point to the statute. Only one side has the Constitution's Appointments Clause behind it.
U.S. attorneys are the president's prosecutors. They typically require Senate confirmation, and the law does permit attorneys general to make temporary appointments for limited time periods. But the notion that unelected judges should select the officials who decide which cases the federal government brings is, to put it plainly, an inversion of how the system is supposed to work. Prosecutors answer to the executive. Judges evaluate their work. Those roles are not interchangeable.
The Hundley firing is not an isolated event. The NY Post reports that last week, the Justice Department fired Kinsella, a lawyer appointed by judges to be the U.S. attorney for northern New York, after he spent less than a day in the job. That appointment came after judges in the district declined to keep John Sarcone, the Trump administration's pick, in place after his 120-day term elapsed. The pattern is clear: judges in multiple districts are attempting to install their own selections, and the Justice Department is rejecting every one of them.
The Eastern District of Virginia has been mired in upheaval since September, when veteran prosecutor Erik Siebert resigned. Siebert was effectively forced out amid pressure to bring cases against some of the president's biggest political foes, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump lawyer and White House aide, swiftly replaced Siebert as interim U.S. attorney. Under her watch, the office secured indictments against both Comey and James. A judge later deemed Halligan to have been unlawfully appointed. The cases were dismissed, and the Justice Department has appealed that decision. Halligan resigned from the position last month.
That resignation created the vacancy that judges filled with Hundley, and the Justice Department emptied just as fast.
What's playing out in the Eastern District is a microcosm of a much larger institutional tension. For decades, the permanent bureaucracy of the federal government, including elements of the judiciary, has operated with a degree of autonomy that the current administration views as incompatible with democratic accountability. When judges appoint prosecutors, they are not performing a neutral administrative function. They are making a political choice about who wields the coercive power of the state. They are choosing who decides which Americans face federal charges and which do not.
The left frames these firings as authoritarian overreach. That framing requires you to believe that the president of the United States asserting control over his own prosecutors is somehow a threat to democracy, while unelected judges handpicking those same prosecutors is a safeguard for it. The logic collapses under its own weight.
Senate confirmation exists precisely because the appointment of U.S. attorneys is supposed to involve democratic accountability. The temporary appointment process, whether exercised by the attorney general or contested by district courts, was never meant to become a permanent workaround. It was a bridge, not a fortress.
The appeals over Halligan's original appointment will work their way through the courts. The broader legal question of whether the executive or the judiciary controls interim U.S. attorney selections may ultimately land before the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the Justice Department has made its position unmistakable: every judge-appointed replacement will be shown the door.
Hundley may have had 30 years of experience. None of that mattered the moment his appointment became a vehicle for judicial encroachment on executive power.
The president picks his prosecutors. That's not a controversy. That's the Constitution.
