a conflict of interest, and that that mandated his appointment of a special counsel in this case. the real concern is, does it slow the process down? now, you ve got someone new getting into the mix. they have to stand up in office. that takes time in a bureaucracy. garland seemed fully aware of those concerns today, and he explicitly talked about that, saying that he would provide resources, that he expected jack smith to jump straight into the process, and interestingly, as you point out, appointing smith, who has recently been involved in the war crimes prosecutions in kosovo, he went to that investigation after it had been in progress for some period of time but before any indictments had been brought, seemed to jump into that one midstream and charge straight ahead. so one supposes garland may have been favorably influenced by his experience in that regard. yeah, really interesting. you mentioned the timing. that jumped out, i think, to everyone. timing is part of this. this is
classified documents and whether he or anyone else should be indicted for that. now, garland says he made this new move today because both trump and biden are now intending to or already running for president. and he tapped a veteran prosecutor to be the new mueller, to be special counsel. today, i signed an order appointing jack smith to serve as special counsel. the order authorizes him to continue the ongoing investigation into both of the matters. mr. smith is the right choice to complete these matters in an even-handed and urgent manner. that is the brief. that s the assignment. jack smith is a career prosecutor. he has a high reputation for integrity. he ran the doj division called the public integrity unit. he has experience with exactly the kind of special challenges that come in these cases. we hear so much about no one being above the law, and we ll discuss that later tonight, but
of people who have made these tough calls before. joyce vance and david kelly, who, full disclosure, was my former boss when i practiced law. welcome to both of you. joyce, i just walked through the news of it, meaning, what garland said and what this does. in your view, if somebody s just wondering, how does this affect the open probes, if at all, what s your answer? yeah, you know, these are nuanced questions, and there will be a lot of criticism of this move that merrick garland has made, because this investigation is under way. it s not a brand-new investigation being stood up where you immediately see a conflict of interest and appoint a special counsel. what happened here, according to merrick garland s speech, was the convergence of two events, former president trump s announcement of his new candidacy, and joe biden s earlier statements where he suggested he would seek the presidency. that, garland believes, creates
general ashcroft, who was hill, appointed patrick fitzgerald to investigate scooter libby and the way he did it was to delegate to him, making him acting attorney general for the sole purpose of the scooter libby investigation. that gave him full power and authority as if he were the attorney general. so and likewise, and i think joyce may have had the same appearance that i did, which was, while i was u.s. attorney, in neighboring u.s. attorneys offices, there were times when the u.s. attorney was recused and i was brought in four or five times, and i was the acting u.s. attorney in other districts to handle investigations. so, if the attorney general really wanted to make this completely independent, one of the thoughts is to make the person who he appoints to this position to be, you know, answering to no one except himself. obviously, there are dangers with that too. but the bottom line that i m getting at is that i don t know that under these circumstances, this appointment is
come to the justice department only to say, you know, we think we ll pass on this prosecution. it looks like these folks are for real, that they re serious about taking a good hard look at the evidence here, and perhaps where there s value added in this process that merrick garland has decided to use comes in the day-to-day oversight of the investigation. it s a subtle point, but in a typical case, you have a united states attorney who s a presidential appointee, someone who has some sort of a political piece of skin in the game, and they re deciding what leads get investigated. what investigative steps get taken next. how does the case progress, or where you put the brakes on. now that there s a special counsel in place, that person, who is apolitical, will be making those calls, and that s the sort of circumstantial guarantee of fairness, this sort of lean that doj likes of letting the career people make decisions. it may never appeal to trump and his followers, but i think in hindsi