Justice Department veterans say the current situation has strong parallels to a scenario that played out over a decade ago after allegations surfaced that the Bush White House deliberately leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative married to a prominent Iraq War critic, Joe Wilson.
In that case, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from investigating—handing the decision about whether to invite a special prosecutor to his deputy attorney general, James Comey, who is now director of the FBI.
“There was nothing that anything to do with what Ashcroft said or did in the campaign...He just decided to do this because of the mere fact that he was a political appointee of the president,” said former House Counsel Stan Brand. “That’s the standard now. I think the attorney general of any stripe in any administration is in an untenable position of trying to conduct an investigation or even having people report to him when that investigation involves the president or his aides.”
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https://www.npr.org/2013/05/29/187079882/the-role-of-the-attorney-general-throughout-history
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I took it as the history of special prosecutors and the modern DoJ.
NPR transcript is wide-ranging.
Apologies for non-live links. I think it's an HTML situation.
That’s a good point - very well could be.