Talk:Special counsel

Comment
I'm copying this here from the reference desk so I don't lose it when it gets archived &rarr;Raul654 13:21, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

Special Prosecutor vs Independent Counsel
There are two articles [both of which I wrote :)] -- Special prosecutor and Independent Counsel. Now I have always heard the two terms used synonomously. I want to know what the differences are. If there are none, then I need to move the contents of one to the other and make it a redirect. &rarr;Raul654 12:25, Jan 19, 2004 (UTC)


 * I believe that a Special Prosecutor serves at the will of the Executive, but an Independent Counsel can be fired only for cause. See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/counsel/office/dash.html. -- Jmabel 06:49, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Copyvio
Sbrockway tagged this as a copyvio, but I've reverted. Sbrockway's reasoning was that "first 3 paragraphs are a rewording of definition on law.com". It's actually only the first two sentences, and it's a rewording because there's only so many ways you can describe a prosecutor who is appointed to by congress to investigate Government misconduct. Raul654 04:37, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Special Prosecutor Question
Can someone better word the beginning of the article that defines what a special prosecutor is? I ask, because it would seem that Patrick Fritzgerald, for instance, was most definitely not outside of the federal government; he's a federal prosecutor for goodness' sake. --Criticalthinker 08:11, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Fritzgerald was a special prosecutor because he is the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Meaning he was from outside of Washington, D.C., so while he is a federal prosecutor he was not considered close to the Bush administration. &mdash; Steven Andrew Miller (talk) 20:51, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I just stumbled across this article. Could the larger historical context be of importance? | Julian A. Cook, III, The Independent Counsel Statute: A Premature Demise, Brigham Young Law Review, 2000 — Preceding unsigned comment added by LeaNder (talk • contribs) 13:53, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

Special Prosecutors outside the US
This article is interesting, but needs to be expanded to discuss special prosecutors outside the US. I came looking for info on special prosecutors in Canada. A special prosecutor is looking in to the income trusts leak, and there have been some calls for a special prosecutor to look into the airbus affair. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.10.162.85 (talk) 05:10, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Not broad enough
A special prosecutor is also a lawyer who is, or anyway was, hired by an aggrieved person to work independently in bringing an accused person to trial. It was at one time used in Missouri but is not any longer. The article is quite insufficient without some info on this use of the term. Sorry, but I don't have time to do it now, but am flagging it in case anybody else wants to improve this very interesting article. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 16:48, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Where's Ken Starr, perhaps the most famous special prosecutor?
Isn't it remarkable that he doesn't appear to be mentioned at all in this article? Hsfrey (talk) 00:07, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Comment inserted in article
I saw this comment in the article itself. So i moved this to the talk page.

---

NOTE FROM AN EDITOR NOT THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR:

To begin, this overall article speaks about U.S. federal prosecutors, which should be specified because both other countries and individual U.S. states can and do appoint such persons, with appointment procedures, authority, and responsibilities not identical to those at the U.S. federal level.

More importantly, it appears to me that there is some lack of clarity in this article. The terms "Special Prosecotor" and "Special Counsel" seem to become interchangeable at some point. "Special Prosecutor Investigation" seems to be used to describe investigations conducted by both Special Prosecutors and Special Counsels. Both titles do describe someone appointed to conduct an investigation into something which, for some reason, could foreseeably create a conflict of interest within the DOJ, possibly inhibiting the investigator's ability to conduct a fair, timely, and unbiased investigation, with the possible problem avoided by appointing an investigator who is largely free from direct DOJ supervision, although ultimately responsible to the AG or, if the AG is recused, to the Acting AG. However, the two positions are not identical. The Special Counsel is somewhat more restricted as to initial appointment qualifications, responsibilities, investigational jurisdiction, etc. as both a matter of law and by the specific instructions he is given by the appointing official, who might be the AG, the Assistant AG, or even the President, as to what he will investigate. Also, Special Prosecutors have as a practical matter been able to expand the scope of an investigation almost at will, sometimes with only the most tenuous connection to the subject of the original investigation. A Special Counsel, largely due to the explicit instructions he receives with his appointment, is not as free to so widely expand his investigation. I really wish that the original author would thoroughly explain the differences between a Special Prosecutor and a Special Counsel.

--- 80.255.245.231 (talk) 08:44, 18 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Explain "explain the differences between a Special Prosecutor and a Special Counsel" you ask? - well this attempts to answer that question. (I'm not sure it succeeds), but this ends up simply saying that: "The current term used is “special counsel”. Snori (talk) 02:44, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

New article for special counsel on 2016 election?
The investigations of the 2016 U.S. presidential election by Mueller and team seem to call for a separate article, spun off from this article and others. Please comment if that seems like a bad idea, otherwise I, or someone, will probably do it. -- econterms (talk)

Move this Page
Seeing as the article only focuses on the United States wouldn't it make sense to rename this article "Special Prosecutor in the United States" or something along those lines? MJV479 (talk) 15:54, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

User:MJV479 Yes. WP:MOVE makes sense here. Thanks for seeing it, and for seeking input and consensus. I would give it the full month for any other comments to show, just to establish comments period as complete, and suggest then simply moving it without still having this title as a redirect. I agree that this article is specific to the United States. I also think the approach is different elsewhere — Canada for example has a standing Ethics Commissioner (Canada) and in Britain the PM would be the one who might order an investigation. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 13:32, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Special Counsel investigation (2017–2019) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 22:17, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Special counsel
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Special counsel's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "cnn": From John Durham:  From Jack Smith (lawyer):  From Ken Starr:  From List of controversies involving The New York Times:  From Killing of Ma'Khia Bryant:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 01:13, 19 November 2022 (UTC)