There's virtually no chance Laura Loomer gets the special counsel she's asking for
It is extraordinarily unlikely that President Donald Trump's Justice Department will heed the far-right commentator's call to appoint a special counsel to manage the Jeffrey Epstein files for reasons both practical and political: Doing so would require a reversal of such gargantuan proportions that it seems almost impossible to imagine.
Every member of the DOJ's upper ranks — Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, soon-to-be Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and top DOJ official Emil Bove — has forcefully argued that independent special counsels defy the Constitution. In fact, they helped develop the argument that crushed one of special counsel Jack Smith's criminal cases against Trump last year.
Trump himself spent years attacking the existence of special counsels — prosecutors appointed by the Justice Department to handle certain politically explosive cases. And he celebrated U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's ruling last year endorsing his argument.
But it was Blanche, Woodward and Bove who refined the legal underpinnings of that argumentas criminal defense attorneys in Smith's investigation into the presence of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after Trump's first term. Bondi, at the time, worked for the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute and signed a brief echoing the president's position. Now, they would need to abandon their arguments entirely.
Loomer, an increasingly influential Trump adviser, has spearheaded calls for a special counsel to oversee the handling of files connected to the investigation of Epstein, the disgraced financier who was convicted of sex crimes and suspected of trafficking minors before he died by suicide in jail in 2019.
Bondi in February told Fox News that a 'client list' with high-profile names associated with Epstein's crimes was 'sitting on my desk right now to review.' Then, when Bondi and her DOJ leadership opted against making the case files public — despite years of hype and promises to expose the purportedly salacious details within them — Loomer began calling for Bondi to be fired and for a special counsel to take over the handling of the Epstein case.
But the basis for a special counsel appointment in this case is unclear. DOJ regulations require that they be appointed to run active criminal investigations— which the Epstein case is not — and only when the Justice Department or administration has a conflict of interest connected to the matter. There's been no suggestion that Trump's DOJ leaders are conflicted, even if his allies have quarreled with their handling of it.
On Wednesday, when asked if he was considering a special counsel, Trump said he had 'nothing to do with' the decision — effectively leaving the call to Bondi. Then today, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump 'would not recommend' that DOJ appoint a 'special prosecutor' in the Epstein saga.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
And special counsels, while maintaining a veneer of independence, nevertheless report to Justice Department leaders about major decisions and would, in this case, still operate under Bondi's supervision.
In fact, the thrust of Bondi's argument in the Florida case was that Smith's claim of independent authority was inherently unconstitutional.
'Trump spent several years arguing that appointing a special counsel from outside DOJ was unconstitutional,' said Josh Blackman, a legal expert from South Texas College of Law Houston, who participated in the argument against Smith's appointment before Cannon. 'It is possible to designate a U.S. attorney to investigate. But that special counsel would still be supervised by Bondi. I'm not sure what would be gained.'
Bondi would also have the ultimate say in whether any report from a special counsel is made public.
Of course, precedent and consistency have not always dissuaded Trump from adopting politically convenient positions. But Trump has long distrusted special counsels and the independence they exercise, which can lead them down investigative paths that are not always predictable.
In 2017, Trump's own Justice Department appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to probe the 2016 Trump campaign's links to Russia, an investigation that dogged him for two years and led to several prosecutions of close advisers.
In 2020, Trump privately endorsed the appointment of attorney Sidney Powell as special counsel to investigate his false claims of election fraud, part of his campaign to cling to power despite losing at the polls. But resistance from senior White House aides scuttled the appointment.
And in 2022, President Joe Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed Smith, a veteran prosecutor, to probe Trump's effort to subvert the 2020 election, as well as his alleged concealment of classified documents. Both probes led to federal criminal charges — the first ever against a former president — that were dropped after Trump won a second term.
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