Last night, Judge Amy Berman Jackson held that President Trump's removal of Hampton Dellinger as the Special Counsel of the Office of Special Counsel was unlawful. [Note, this involves a specific office in the federal government, and not "special counsels" like Robert Mueller appointed to investigate alleged executive branch wrongdoing.]
in Dellinger v. Bessent, Judge Jackson rejected the Trump Administration's argument that the statutory provision barring the removal of the Special Counsel without cause unconstitutionally constrains the President's authority to remove executive branch officers. She wrote:
The Court finds that the statute is not unconstitutional. And it 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.
