FILE PHOTO: Special Counsel of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger poses for a portrait in an undated handout image.
U.S. Office Of Special Counsel | Via Reuters
A top federal ethics watchdog who was fired last month by President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is dropping a lawsuit challenging his dismissal.
The announcement by Office of Special Counsel chief Hampton Dellinger came a day after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., said that he could be removed from his post by Trump while the legal fight over his case played out.
Dellinger, who had retained his job as a result of a lower court’s order on Feb. 10, in a statement obtained by NBC News said that he was abandoning the legal battle because of the amount of time it could take to resolve.
“I’m stopping the fight because, yesterday, circuit court judges reviewing the trial court decision in my favor granted the government’s request that I be removed from office while the case continues,” Dellinger said.
“This new ruling means that OSC will be run by someone totally beholden to the President for the months that would pass before I could get a final decision from the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said.
The OSC is responsible for protecting federal employees who act as whistleblowers by flagging issues of waste, fraud and abuse in the U.S. government.
As part of this job, Dellinger in recent weeks has been opposing efforts by the Trump administration to fire government workers.
Dellinger, who was appointed to his post last year by President Joe Biden, also said he believed a three-judge appels panel that issued that ruling “erred badly because their willingness to sign off on my ouster — even if presented as possibly temporary — immediately erases the independence Congress provided for my position, a vital protection that has been accepted as lawful for nearly fifty years.”
Dellinger in his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., had argued that Trump’s firing of him was illegal because it failed to comply with a federal law that says special counsels can only be removed “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance of office.”
On Saturday, District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed, ruling that Dellinger’s termination was “unlawful.”
The Department of Justice then appealed Jackson’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which in its order Thursday said Dellinger could be removed from his post while the DOJ’s appeal played out.
