dana: president trump announcing today that he will pardon conservative commentator and filmmaker dinesh d souza for a campaign finance violation. he is considering doing the same for martha stewart and commuting the sentence of former illinois governor rod blagojevich. but what about first-time drug to firmeds like matthew charles who we have offenders like matthew charles and the case that brought kim kardashian to the white house? we have the former assistant deputy assistant general under president bush. rumors are that matthew charles case and probably alice johnson is out there in the universe at the white house so perhaps we will get news on that as well. in the meantime, tom, let me ask about this. look at the president s time line of the pardons so far in his administration. starting early on in august of 2017 with sheriff arpaio and then moving on down to, of course, lewis libby scooter libby being probably the most prominent one in april 13. then the posthumous pardon
three, four, five years after the investigation began. the rules that are in effect now allow the justice department a couple of options. one is to pick somebody within the justice department, but maybe not in the usual chain of command or chain of jurisdiction for this kind of a case. most of the activity here you would think went on in washington, d.c. or new york. you could pick somebody out of town for that. that s sort of what happened in the lewis libby, the ghags ended up targeting lewis libby under the bush administration, that was the valerie plain leak of her identity as a cia officer. so there they turned to pat fitzgerald, u.s. attorney in chicago and appointed him as a special council, but there are rules that allow them still to go outside the department and just pick an esteemed lawyer to look into this issue. and you mention to do that independent council that used to exist, that was one of those things historically that democrats were for sort of because of watergate