Dems are not the only one to argue the subordinate role of the special counsel. One of the most strident people in a position to check this power, Judge T. S. Ellis, upheld the authority of Rosenstein to appoint Mueller and investigate Manafort, citing the Appointments Clause on page 24 of his ruling this past summer.
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000164-3dc7-dbdc-a96d-3dff8c890001
I am aware of Ellis's ruling, but there is another problem--and it's a big one: under the Special Counsel statute, a Special Counsel is supposed to be closely supervised by the DOJ, thereby making a Special Counsel a low-level officer rather than a principal officer. Fine. But Ellis seems to have been addressing that rather narrow point of the law without snarling himself in the different but related and
important legal matter of Mueller's statutorily improper oversight by DOJ's Rosenstein. Mueller has been
unsupervised, so to speak--thus making him a
de facto principal officer.
Two examples: First, a Special Counsel is supposedly required to follow DOJ policy. (I believe this is in the Special Counsel statute, and it definitely goes to the matter of DOJ oversight.) By threatening POTUS with a criminal prosecution bypassing an impeachment, Mueller was flagrantly defying DOJ policy. In the next place, and even more ominous, perhaps, the DOJ is supposed to draft a narrow scope for any Special Counsel--a narrow scope being surely necessary to prevent any abuse of the Special Counsel's potentially ominous power.
Mueller's supervisor (Rosenstein) gave him an essentially open-ended scope of work despite a mention of Russian Collusion. The scope was designed to facilitate a fishing expedition automatically authorizing what has proven to be a horrific abuse of power--an abuse smashing through attorney-client privilege and chasing down miscellaneous rabbit trails, including Manafort's banking records more than a decade old with no genuinely probable cause of any connection to Russian Collusion. Mueller was looking for any dirt whatsoever on Trump--because that was the
real scope of work given to him by his DOJ "supervisor." But looking for "any dirt whatsoever" is
ILLEGAL.
Even Ellis himself was appalled at Mueller's tactics of trying to make Trump's associates squeal under the threat of horrific sentences (and, in squealing, likely even to
lie about POTUS) in an effort to snag Trump for any crime whatsoever--including any of which Trump was
innocent but
frameable. This jailhouse snitching stuff is unfortunately legal, as Ellis had to admit, but the fact that Ellis allowed Mueller to pull these unethical shenanigans in an extraordinarily important investigation of the President of the United States is alarming, indeed. The entire investigation is obviously a political witch hunt in the first place--a witch hunt that was even
launched by
framing Trump and his campaign to get the bogus surveillance warrants of campaign personnel.
Putting all of this together, the Mueller investigation is a horrific violation of the Constitution and the Special Counsel statute. Mueller is not merely the point man in a witch hunt, but a loose cannon exercising a principal officer's power in violation of the Constitution and the Statute.
