A federal appeals court cleared the way for President Donald Trump to fire Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, on Wednesday.
Dellinger, appointed to the role by former President Joe Biden, sued the Trump administration in Washington, D.C., federal court after his Feb. 7 firing.
D.C. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson had argued in a filing last month that Dellinger’s firing was ‘unlawful.’
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the Trump administration in a Wednesday ruling, however. Dellinger is likely to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
Jackson claimed that 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.’
Dellinger has maintained the argument that, by law, he can only be dismissed from his position for job performance problems, which were not cited in an email dismissing him from his post.
Earlier in February, liberal Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson voted to outright deny the administration’s request to approve the firing.
Conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissented, saying the lower court overstepped. They also cast doubt on whether courts have the authority to restore to office someone the president has fired. While acknowledging that some officials appointed by the president have contested their removal, Gorsuch wrote in his opinion that ‘those officials have generally sought remedies like backpay, not injunctive relief like reinstatement.’