[Meet the New Boss]

I have posted before on FR that there is a serious question as to whether the appointment of Mueller as Special Counsel is legally valid in light of the fact that statutory law requires every US Attorney to be confirmed by Congress, and yet DOJ regulations purport to give a special counsel the powers of a US Attorney without being confirmed by the Senate.

See Is the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller legal without Senate approval?

Manafort should have standing to raise this objection, since he has been indicted by a grand jury convened by the Special Counsel.

They could have appointed an already sitting US Attorney instead of Mueller as Special Counsel and avoided this legal problem. But they wanted Comey's mentor and best buddy to make sure it went down as desired.

The Manafort case may be particularly relevant to this issue in that one could argue that because a Special Counsel has a limited, defined scope he is not a full US Attorney requiring Senate confirmation; however, in this case the Special Counsel is investigating and obtaining indictments outside the defined scope of Russian collusion during the election.

[jazusamo]

Sounds like an excellent point to me.

[qaz123]

great post. It’s why I like FR and some others. get insight from folks that see things from different angles.

[Jim W N]

There is a basic constitutional problem with this “Special Prosecutor” and his role. The Constitutional problem overrides the statutory problem. The statute itself is likely to be unconstitutional.