
Left: President Donald Trump gives remarks during an event celebrating the 2024 Stanley Cup Champion the Florida Panthers in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on Monday, February 3, 2025 (Photo by Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images). Right: Hampton Dellinger (Office of Special Counsel).
President Donald Trump unlawfully booted Biden ethics enforcer Hampton Dellinger from the Office of Special Counsel after he took office in January, a federal judge ruled Saturday — setting the stage for a critical Supreme Court battle — with Trump’s Justice Department condemning the weekend judgement as an “extraordinary intrusion into the president’s authority.”
“In sum, it would be antithetical to the very existence of this particular government agency and position to vindicate the President’s Article II power as it was described in Humphrey’s Executor (Humphrey’s Executor v. United States): a constitutional license to bully officials in the executive branch into doing his will,” wrote U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in a 67-page opinion.
Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee, ruled in favor of letting Dellinger keep his job after listening to arguments from DOJ lawyers and Delligner’s legal team at multiple hearings over the past month, which stemmed from a temporary restraining order she issued on Feb. 12 that stayed Trump’s original termination of Dellinger in January.