Trump said he wouldn’t “recommend” one in the Epstein saga. But there are other reasons for top brass at DOJ to resist the calls.
Sorry, Laura Loomer.
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 argument as 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.