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office of special counsel
Trump Taps 'Comically Unfit' Election Denier to Head Key Legal Ethics Office
"Leading the Office of Special Counsel requires independence and experience," said one watchdog. "Paul Ingrassia seemingly has neither of these things."
May 30, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday nominated a far-right former podcast host with white supremacist views who called for martial law to keep Trump in power after his 2020 election loss to lead a key legal ethics office.
Trump tapped 30-year-old Paul Ingrassia—who is currently serving as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security—to head the Office of Special Counsel, an independent investigative and prosecutorial agency tasked with enforcing ethics laws and protecting federal whistleblowers.
"Paul is a highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar, who has done a tremendous job serving as my White House Liaison for Homeland Security," Trump wrote Thursday on his Truth Social network. "Paul holds degrees from both Cornell Law School and Fordham University, where he majored in Mathematics and Economics, graduating near the top of his class."
Critics, however, had a different assessment of Ingrassia's qualifications.
Hampton Dellinger, the previous OSC chief, was initially fired by Trump in February but was temporarily reinstated via court order before being fired again after he began investigating the administration's mass layoffs of federal workers under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Dellinger dropped his legal challenge in March and announced that "my time as special counsel... is now over."
The OSC enforces the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activity of civilian executive branch employees. In 2021, the agency found that 13 senior Trump aides violated the law by campaigning for the president's failed 2020 reelection bid.
At that time, Ingrassia and his sister Olivia Ingrassia were hosting the "Right on Point" podcast. As Trump stoked the conspiracy theory that Democrats stole the election, Ingrassia amplified the president's "Big Lie" and called for authoritarian measures to keep him in the White House.
On December 12, 2020, the podcast's handle on its Twitter page was renamed "Stop the Steal HQ." The account reposted a tweet from prolific white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes with the added message, "Time for @realDonaldTrump to declare martial law and secure his re-election!"
Ingrassia has expressed his own white supremacist views, including the assertion that "exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization, but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage." He also replied to a call for slavery reparations by demanding that the descendants of slaves "pay reparations to the descendants of slave owners" and advocated replacing the "treasonous" Ukrainian flag with the Confederate battle flag under penalty of "serious fines."
During the 2024 Republican presidential primaries, Trump boosted a false birther smear by Ingrassia that Nikki Haley—the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador during the first Trump administration—was ineligible to run for president because her parents were not American citizens when she was born. Ingrassia posted several racist aspersions of Haley's Americanness, which have been archived by freelance journalist Jason Hart.
In March, Daily Dot's Amanda Moore revealed that Ingrassia misrepresented himself as an attorney for more than a year prior to his admission to the bar. During this time, he represented former professional kickboxer, self-described misogynist, and alleged rapist, sex trafficker, and money launderer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate in a civil suit. The Tates deny the charges.
As Moore reported:
As early as May 16, 2023, months before he took the bar exam, Ingrassia referred to himself as "an Associate Attorney at The McBride Law Firm, PLLC" on his personal Substack. But his bio on the site frequently changed. In a July 2023 piece on Tate, he described himself simply as an "associate" at the firm. In August, he referred to himself as a "law clerk." New York state records show that Ingrassia, a 2022 graduate of Cornell Law, took the bar on July 25-26, 2023, under his given name, Paolo Ingrassia. While Ingrassia received his results in October 2023, he was not admitted to the New York State Bar until July 30, 2024.
Responding to his nomination, Ingrassia wrote Thursday on X that "it's the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump!"
"As special counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch—with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce, and revitalize the rule of law and fairness in Hatch Act enforcement," he added.
"This is a pattern with the president's picks for watchdogs: partisan yeasayers whose willingness to stand up to the administration is questionable at best."
However, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan watchdog, said Friday: "Leading the Office of Special Counsel requires independence and experience. Paul Ingrassia seemingly has neither of these things."
"This is a pattern with the president's picks for watchdogs: partisan yeasayers whose willingness to stand up to the administration is questionable at best," POGO added.
Conservative writer Bobby Miller said on X that "the most insane thing about the Paul Ingrassia appointment is that he's been tapped to lead the Office of Special Counsel, an ethics watchdog tasked with enforcing laws that protect federal employees from abuse and safeguard the government from politicization."
"No one's even pretending that this Andrew Tate fanboy, Putin stooge, and martial law enthusiast would do anything even close to the job description," Miller added.
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Internal Watchdog Ruling Indicates DOGE Mass Public Worker Firings 'Unlawful'
"Trump's only plan here seems to be to inflict chaos and suffering on the American people and the federal workers who serve them," said one critic.
Feb 24, 2025
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel—the independent agency that protects government whistleblowers—has deemed "at least some" of the Trump administration's mass firing of civil servants in their probationary periods to be illegal and recommended halting their termination, according to reporting Monday.
Government Executive senior correspondent Eric Katz reported that the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which investigates unlawful actions against federal employees and prosecutes misconduct, issued a decision on the firings of six such workers at different agencies. The terminations are part of a mass purge of federal workers by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE).
"In accordance with its legal responsibility to safeguard the merit system, OSC seeks this stay because the probationary terminations at issue in this matter appear to have been effectuated in a manner inconsistent with federal personnel laws," the agency said.
1/2 An important victory for federal probationary workers. This one not in the courts. Office of Special Counsel: "The probationary terminations at issue in this matter appear to have been effectuated in a manner inconsistent with federal personnel laws."
[image or embed]
— Ryan Goodman ( @rgoodlaw.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 11:21 AM
The request to block the workers' termination and reinstate them came in a class-wide complaint filed by the advocacy group Democracy Forward and Alden Law Group on behalf of the civil servants, who according to the filing were fired "with no regard for the performance or conduct," but rather due to their probationary status.
"While the decision was technically limited in scope, it could have immediate impact on all terminated staff at those six agencies and could set a wide-ranging precedent across government," Katz wrote. "It has not been made public and was provided to Government Executive by a source within the government. OSC, which did not provide the document to Government Executive, verified its authenticity."
U.S. Special Counsel Hamilton Dellinger—whose recent termination by Trump was temporarily blocked last week by the Supreme Court—said in a statement Monday that "firing probationary employees without individualized cause appears contrary to a reasonable reading of the law, particularly the provisions establishing rules for reductions in force."
Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said Monday that "today's news from the Office of Special Counsel confirms what we have long known: The mass termination of federal workers is unlawful, and Trump's only plan here seems to be to inflict chaos and suffering on the American people and the federal workers who serve them, as opposed to using our government to better the lives of working Americans, families, and communities across the country."
Some observers have said the specter of termination is a deliberate tactic to instill fear in federal civil servants, upon whom Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said he wishes to inflict "trauma."
The fate of the six federal workers will be decided by the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), an independent quasi-judicial federal agency tasked with reviewing the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), control of which was reportedly seized by DOGE last month.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras last week invalidated Trump's likely unlawful bid to fire Democratic MSPB Chairwoman Cathy Harris.
Responding to Monday's OSC decision, Alden Law Group partner Michelle Bercovici said that "the administration's mass termination of employees in their first or second year on the job is an unprecedented and grossly unfair circumvention of the merit principles upon which our civil service is based."
"These hardworking employees should have the opportunity to let their work speak for itself," Bercovici added.
Rob Shriver, managing director of Democracy Forward's Civil Service Strong program and a former acting OPM director, said Monday: "It's common sense that if you want to remove someone for poor performance, you actually have to look at that person's performance in the job. And if they looked, they'd see the value that these workers bring."
"The mass terminations of probationary employees are flatly illegal and we urge the MSPB to move swiftly to implement this recommendation," Shriver added.
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A Right-Wing Supreme Court Won't Save Us From This Right-Wing President
Today especially, remember that we celebrate President's Day—not Dictator's Day—for a reason.
Feb 17, 2025
It is well to remind ourselves that today is President’s Day, not Dictator’s Day.
Of all the things the framers of the Constitution worried about, their biggest worry was that a president would become as powerful as a king. Which is why they created Congress and the judiciary — to check and constrain him.
Fast forward to the first Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when inequalities of income and wealth had become extreme that the so-called “Robber Barons” of the era (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg) controlled the economy, and corruption was rampant. (I say “first” Gilded Age because we are now clearly in the second.)
Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the Robber Barons’ incomes, limits on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies to limit their power. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, was established as an independent agency in 1914, to take on corporate monopolies and fraud.
Fast forward again to today. There are by now 19 independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Office of Special Counsel.
These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations.
But I fear that the Supreme Court is about to end their independence.
On Sunday, White House lawyers asked the justices to allow Trump to fire the head of an independent watchdog agency. It’s the first case to reach the Supreme Court arising from the blizzard of actions taken by Trump in the early weeks of the new administration.
The White House’s emergency application asks the Supreme Court to vacate a federal trial judge’s order temporarily reinstating Hampton Dellinger, head of the Office of Special Counsel.
The Office of Special Counsel — a little-known but important independent agency — enforces federal whistleblower laws, which protect whistleblowers from political retribution, and the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity.
In the 1978 law that established the Office of Special Counsel, Congress gave the Counsel a five-year term and provided that he or she could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
But Trump’s one-sentence email to Dellinger on Feb. 7 gave no reasons for firing him, effective immediately.
Dellinger sued. He called his removal illegal and argued that nothing about his performance could possibly meet the standard Congress laid out for dismissing a special counsel:
“Since my arrival at OSC last year, I could not be more proud of all we have accomplished. The agency’s work has earned praise from advocates for whistleblowers, veterans, and others. The effort to remove me has no factual nor legal basis — none — which means it is illegal.”
Since February 7, Dellinger has continued to police the government against Hatch Act and whistle-blower violations — even when they have involved federal workers who allegedly discriminated against Trump. (In a complaint filed last Tuesday, Dellinger alleged that, during a hurricane response in October, an aid supervisor for the Federal Emergency Management Agency illegally instructed FEMA workers not to visit homes with Trump signs.)
Last Monday night, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump from firing Dellinger.
Judge Jackson wrote that the 1978 law “expresses Congress’s clear intent to ensure the independence of the special counsel and insulate his work from being buffeted by the winds of political change,” adding that the government’s “only response to this inarguable reading of the text is that the statute is unconstitutional.”
On Saturday, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected Trump’s emergency motion for a stay of Judge Jackson’s ruling. The unsigned majority opinion said the government’s motion was premature.
“The question here is not whether the president is entitled to prompt review of his important constitutional arguments. Of course he is. The issue before us is whether his mere claim of extraordinary harm justifies this court’s immediate review, which would essentially remove the legal issues from the district court’s ambit before its proceedings have concluded.”
In its Sunday filing before the Supreme Court, the White House said the Supreme Court “should not allow lower courts to seize executive power by dictating to the president how long he must continue employing an agency head against his will.” Translated: Congress can not limit the president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies.
Make no mistake. This is a fundamental challenge to the basic idea — part of the fabric of our government for well over a century — that Congress has the power to create independent agencies.
Trump’s emergency application took direct aim at a precedent from 1935 in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Congress can shield independent agencies from politics.
That case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” — the same language that Congress used decades later to protect the Special Counsel.
Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired a commissioner, William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.
Fast forward again. The Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent regulatory agencies. Most of the current justices subscribe to what’s called the “unitary executive” theory, a bonkers notion that the framers intended for a president to have total control over every aspect of the executive branch.
In 2020, the Roberts Supreme Court laid the groundwork for reversing Humphrey’s Executor in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The law that created the Bureau — again, using language identical to that at issue in Humphrey’s Executor and in Dellinger’s case — said the president could remove its director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down that provision, ruling that it violated the separation of powers and that the president could remove the bureau’s director for any reason. Roberts, writing for the majority, said the presidency requires an “energetic executive.” He continued:
“In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”
Two justices — Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — would have pulled the plug on independent agencies then and there. Thomas wrote:
“The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for what was then the court’s four liberals, dissented, saying the Constitution did not address the scope of the president’s power to fire subordinates. Congress should therefore be free, she said, to grant agencies “a measure of independence from political pressure.”
That 2020 decision by the majority of the Supreme Court anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision last July that granted Trump, then a private citizen, immunity from prosecution for any “official” conduct during his first term.
So what now? I’m afraid the Trump White House and the Supreme Court have teed up the Dellinger case to mark the end of Humphries Executor — and therefore the practical end of independent agencies. They may carve out the Federal Reserve on some pretext, but they are bent on centralizing presidential power.
I wish I could be more hopeful, but I honestly don’t see any other decision emerging from this high court.
Celebrate President’s Day today, not Dictator’s Day. And don’t, whatever you do, give up hope. This is all part of democracy’s stress test. I guarantee that eventually democracy will come out stronger for it.
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