A federal judge has ruled that President Donald Trump's decision to fire the head of the special counsel investigation was unlawful. The judge's decision comes after legal challenges surrounding the dismissal, marking a significant development in ongoing legal proceedings.
On Saturday, D.C. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Hampton Dellinger’s firing, appointed by former President Joe Biden to head the Office of Special Counsel, was “unlawful.”
“The Special Counsel’s job is to look into and expose unethical or unlawful practices directed at federal civil servants and to help ensure that whistleblowers who disclose fraud, waste, and abuse on the part of government agencies can do so without suffering reprisals,” Jackson wrote. “It would be ironic, to say the least, and inimical to the ends furthered by the statute if the Special Counsel himself could be chilled in his work by fear of arbitrary or partisan removal.”
The court "finds that the elimination of the restrictions on plaintiff’s removal would be fatal to the defining and essential feature of the Office of Special Counsel as it was conceived by Congress and signed into law by the President: its independence. The Court concludes that they must stand,” her ruling continued.
Jackson enjoined the defendants in the lawsuit, including the Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and ordered them to recognize Dellinger's post. She wrote that the enjoined defendants "must not obstruct or interfere with his performance of his duties; they must not deny him the authority, benefits, or resources of his office; they must not recognize any Acting Special Counsel in his place; and they must not treat him in any way as if he has been removed, or recognize any other person as Special Counsel or as the head of the Office of Special Counsel, unless and until he is removed from office.”
The Trump administration filed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which declined to overturn the ruling on a 2-1 vote.
Last month, Trump dismissed Dellinger via email as part of a broader effort by his administration to reduce the size of the federal workforce, which included the removal of nearly two dozen other government watchdogs.
Dellinger immediately filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that the “email made no attempt to comply with the Special Counsel’s for-cause removal protection.”
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