What is So Special About a Special Prosecutor?

The news is replete with discussion of indictments, grand juries, lying to the Government, coverups and clandestine informants and “special” prosecutors.  Something is wrong with a system that allows congress to shirk it’s responsibilities and place it’s over sight and investigative powers into the hands of secret, “special” investigators.  The whole concept of privacy, freedom from search and seizure and a whole host of other “rights” seem to disappear down a rat hole of behind the scenes nonsense.  When the deputy Attorney General  gives the President of the Untied States his opinion that the President has every right (which he does) and good reasons (which even the Democrats had believed) to fire the Director of the FBI and the President does so, and the General turns around and calls for a special counsel to investigate the President for obstruction for following his advice, we have gone down some rabbit hole..

Conrad Black in his biography of Richard Nixon, “A Life in Full”, writes –

The American prosecutorial system encourages a system of suborned or intimidated perjury, or at least spontaneous clarity of recollection, to move upwards in the inculpation of officials in any organization where wrongdoing is alleged. Plea bargains are negotiated by threat and financial strangulation and reduction of penalties, as lower echelons roll over in sequence blaming higher-ups. It is a questionable system, which led decades later to the installation of the “whistleblower” -i.e., the squealer -as one of the central figures in American commerce. This process is topped out with the “allocution,” as the plea-bargainer denounces himself like the tortured victim of Stalin’s show trials. Since the purpose of the plea bargain, for the confessant, is to reduce his sentence, the United States at least avoids the splendid Stalinist flourish of the accused
demanding the swiftest possible imposition of the death penalty on himself as a minimum punishment for the abominable crimes of these almost always innocent (at least of what they were admitting), people.