The Real Problem with Hampton Dellinger

The Biden family friend is a longtime Democratic Party activist with a history of making anti-Trump statements and holding views hostile to the president. He's now sabotaging Trump's agenda.

The current head of Trump’s Office of Special Counsel

Several weeks before the 2020 election, a former Democratic candidate for statewide office in North Carolina and ex-colleague of Hunter Biden publicly doubted America’s safety under the leadership of then President Donald Trump:

“Has there ever been an American who posed a greater national security risk to America than Donald Trump?” the Biden family friend posted on Twitter in September 2020.

The author of that tweet is Hampton Dellinger, the current head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) under the new Trump administration. The president fired Dellinger, who was appointed by Joe Biden to a five-year term in 2023, on February 7; a few days later, Dellinger filed a lawsuit in Washington to keep his job as the handler of federal workforce complaints including whistleblowers and Hatch Act violations.

And thanks to Obama-appointed DC District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson and the Supreme Court, which refused to end the farce last month, Dellinger remains in the office for the foreseeable future.

At issue, legally, is whether the president can remove Dellinger, the single head of an agency operating under the purview of the executive branch, without “cause.” In the brief email sent to Dellinger, Trump’s personnel office did not cite “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” as reasons for his dismissal, a requirement in the OSC statute. Given that language, Judge Jackson wrote in a 67-page opinion on March 1 preserving Dellinger’s job for now, the firing was unlawful.

Further, Jackson repeatedly argued throughout her whiplash-inducing analysis, the head of the so-called “independent” office of special counsel “must remain entirely free of partisan or political influence.”

Another Democratic Saboteur in the Trump White House

Which raises an even bigger problem for the president and perhaps for the courts as Dellinger remains in the Trump administration: Dellinger himself is a hyper-political partisan with a record of anti-Trump statements that clearly renders him unfit to work for the president in any capacity. He is a longtime Democratic Party aide, activist, and candidate—he unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor of North Carolina in 2008—who holds what he describes as “progressive” political views, which are demonstrably contrary to the president’s agenda.

During his 2021 Senate confirmation as head of Office of Legal Counsel—Biden nominated him to that role first before elevating him to special counsel—Dellinger’s tweets about Trump surfaced. (His account is now protected.)

In a 2018 Politico article, Dellinger said the accusations that Trump “paid off” Stormy Daniels mirrored the hush money case of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards. “I do think this is moving closer and closer to the territory where Edwards was subject to criminal prosecution,” Dellinger claimed.

He also helped bolster the movement in the South to remove Confederate monuments, something Trump has opposed for years; the president recently promised to restore the original Confederate-era names of several military bases changed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020.

Dellinger also believes abortion is a “constitutional and natural right.”

Dellinger’s wife, Jolynn Childers Dellinger, is a Duke Law professor and abortion activist. Last fall, she taught a class that covered the “extent to which the criminalization of abortion in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), together with 21st century surveillance, compromises or eliminates the physical, decisional, and informational privacy of women and people who can become pregnant.”

A Family Affair

The fact is that Dellinger is part of a very political family with longstanding ties to Democrats. (He also worked with Hunter Biden at Bois Schiller during the same time the firm represented corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma.)

His father, Walter Dellinger, is a renowned Democratic Party legal figure who served key posts in the Clinton Administration. As a critic of the current composition of the Supreme Court, Dellinger served on Biden’s commission to consider reforms at the top court. Shortly before his death in 2022, Dellinger wrote an op-ed for the New York Times endorsing Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court:

“There is, however, a long and important tradition of presidents taking into consideration the demographic characteristics of prospective justices — including geographic background, religion, race and sex — to ensure that the Supreme Court is and remains a representative institution in touch with the varied facets of American life. More fundamentally, our history shows that the process of reaching out to expand the personal backgrounds of the justices has often produced stellar jurists who made historic contributions to the court and our judicial system.”

Trump-bashing appears to be a family affair. Hampton’s brother, Drew, is a radical Democrat who routinely posts inflammatory anti-Trump and anti-Republican statements on social media. After his brother was confirmed by the Senate in 2021, Drew posted a celebratory comment noting “my guy got confirmed!”

In just the past week, Drew Dellinger has reposted accounts that claimed Trump is a Putin asset; blamed Elon Musk for starving children around the world; and demanded the resignations of Vice President JD Vance, Speaker Mike Johnson, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the dustup at the White House last week.

This morning, Drew Dellinger appears to call for a more “ruthless” approach by Democrats against the president:

And while getting the year of the first Trump inauguration wrong, Drew Dellinger recently boasted how he “knew” back in 2016 that Trump was a Russian stooge:

A Launching Pad for Another Run for Office?

This is why keeping any political appointee of the prior administration at the top of an agency that possesses power to investigate the current administration is so dangerous. Dellinger, however, poses a unique risk given his decades-long political pursuits and radical beliefs that run counter to everything the president believes. (Dellinger already has successfully fought for the reinstatement of six probationary employees fired by the president with warnings he will seek more.)

Is there any doubt Dellinger will use this lawsuit as the basis for another run for public office? Imagine the Trump-hating donors who will line up to fill Dellinger’s campaign coffers as a reward for taking on Trump. How can Judge Jackson and the Supreme Court continue to endorse such a gambit?

Trump’s Justice Department immediately appealed Jackson’s order; the matter is now pending before the DC circuit, which has twice denied the DOJ’s efforts to reverse Jackson. Regardless, the question appears headed (again) to the Supreme Court, where Dellinger’s fate doesn’t look as rosy. In the past five years, the Court has determined a president can remove a political appointee who serves as the single head of an executive branch agency, something Jackson noted in her opinion: "There is no longer any other agency with a single head, protected by similar restrictions, in the executive branch."

While Dellinger may not survive the long-term legal war, he has succeeded in winning many anti-Trump skirmishes along the way—the perfect platform for any wanna-be Democratic candidate.