Just one day after an appeals court sided temporarily with the Trump administration to remove Hampton Dellinger from his role as special counsel, the onetime government watchdog announced Thursday that he is dropping his lawsuit.
Dellinger was appointed to the role by former President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2024. He was expected to serve a five-year term. As the special counsel for the Office of Special Counsel, Dellinger played a key role for the agency that enforces and investigates federal protections for whistleblowers and political corruption.
The Office of Special Counsel where Dellinger worked is unrelated to the special counsel that investigated President Donald Trump for multiple criminal indictments including his alleged subversion of the 2020 election or his alleged illegal retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Dellinger was fired over email on Feb. 7. In an abrupt message from Sergio Gor, director of White House presidential personnel, Dellinger was given no cause for his termination other than it being Trump’s wishes.
He then sued, claiming that existing laws forbade his removal unless the president could provide specific cause, like neglect of duty or malfeasance.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled late Wednesday that Dellinger would be removed while the merits of the case were hashed out in court. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson had already ruled that his removal was unlawful, and a request for comment on why Dellinger opted to drop the litigation at this stage was not immediately returned.
The Supreme Court ruled in February that Dellinger would be allowed to stay at his job temporarily after the court rejected the administration’s emergency bid to overturn Jackson’s decision.
Justice Department lawyers have argued that Dellinger was properly removed from his post and that attempts by the courts to retain him were an “unprecedented intrusion into the president’s authority.”
In a statement shared with HuffPost on Thursday, Dellinger explained his decision.
“My fight to stay on the job was not for me, but rather for the ideal that that OSC should be as Congress amended: an independent watchdog and a safe, trustworthy place for whistleblowers to report wrongdoing and be protected from retaliation. Now I will look to make a difference — as an attorney, a North Carolinian and an American — in other ways,” he said.
The appellate court’s ruling to temporarily remove him while the legal fight played out meant, in his eyes, that the OSC would 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.
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Dellinger said he thinks that appeals court judges “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.”
His odds of ultimately prevailing before the Supreme Court were “long,” he added.
“I strongly disagree with the circuit court’s decision but I accept and will abide by it. That’s what Americans do,” he said.