“In appointing a special counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump, Attorney General Merrick Garland was, in theory at least, trying to insulate the matter from politics as much as possible,” the New York Times reports.
“That notion, of course, did not even last the day. Within hours, the newly named special counsel, Jack Smith, came under fire from the Trump team as just another partisan inquisitor.”
“The reality is that a special counsel was never going to be accepted by Mr. Trump or his most fervent supporters as a credible, independent investigator, which the attorney general surely knew. Mr. Garland, who has spent more than three decades as a federal prosecutor and judge, was applying an old-fashioned method in a new-fashioned world, following what he felt was the clear mandate of the traditional rules even if they no longer seem adequate to the political moment.”
