jean-pierre when she takes to the podium in 20 minutes which is the president is completely removed from this and no interference with any decisions about how to prosecute this case moving forward, that they have supreme confidence in merrick garland in doing what he has done, and it is notable in this respect, because merrick garland himself was almost, the way he was described in the nomination process, a special counsel of sorts himself. and so now he is removing himself even further from the process, by having a special counsel to make these kind of decisions at the moment. and so now let s talk about what is happening at the white house this. briefing was supposed to happen about 45 minutes ago. it was delayed once. once we got that word, from the justice department about the special counsel being named, now delayed again, and you can understand why. the press secretary preparing for this briefing with her team, was originally anticipating frankly a different set of questions from
mar-a-lago and sort of separately the actions surrounding january 6th and the insurrection at the capitol. yes, so halle, the law says that the special counsel has to be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decision making. robert mueller was the last special counsel to investigate trump and some people thought he was too mild-mannered to stand up to donald trump, and to stand up to the former attorney general, bill barr. but the justice department now seems to be aggressively investigating trump, especially with regard to the national security case at mar-a-lago. and so jack smith, the newly-appointed special counsel, has a lot of catching up to do, he s not starting from scratch, he will work with the investigation by literally hundreds of fbi agents and prosecutors, and they ve gone after 800 people already with connection to january 6th, but nobody at the top. but hallie, those prosecutors
department would have the authority to get rid of him in that case. but it s a very wide scope. it s a lot of work. a lot of responsibility on one man s shoulders. but in the statement that we ve seen already from jack smith, he does not want to in any way slow down or impede this work that has already been start and i think that is key for people who might be worried bringing somebody in new that is new at this point in the game could slow things down. carol, i will turn to you, i know you have some thoughts on the appointment of jack smith himself even as he is already coming under fire from some republicans, allied with donald trump. i think that it is really important, hallie, to set some context around what all of the guests have accurately described about both his gambit and the decision to appoint him. the background and cop text is everything about these two investigations is unprecedented. we can t use the word enough, right? you don t have an attorney
time as a trial attorney. what is his reputation at the d.o.j.? what should we know about him? he was the chief of the public integrity section where i worked as a trial attorney. we didn t overlap. i met him many times. people who work in that section are stead fastly apolitical. but there s also a reason that we wanted to be public corruption prosecutors. those prosecutors have a bad attitude of government officials who don t follow the rules. and yak is a prosecutor s prosecutor. has been trying criminal cases for 0 years. he won two big public corruption cases. one against the former governor of virginia, who by the way was a democrat. and another case against a republican congressman from arizona. i will say that public integrity prosecutors decline more cases than they bring. the justice department standard is you don t prosecute unless you think you can get 12 jurors
of what president biden campaigns on, when he was a candidate, the promise to have this, to allow the justice department to be independent. i happened to be at an event with president biden about the economy, when the news broke, and once we were ushered out of the room, i was among the reporters who shouted at the president, tried to get him to respond to this breaking news, he declined to comment. i can tell you a white house official said to me, d.o.j. makes decisions about its criminal investigations independently and we are not involved. so i would refer you to d.o.j. i expect that is about what we are going to hear from white house press secretary krinne jean-pierre when she takes the bold yum a few moments from now, and we certainly are going to ask her a range of questions around this, hallie, as you know i ve got my list ready to go. we will try to get some information from her, as to when the president found out, what the reaction is here, but again, this president has been v