WHEN YOU COME AT THE KING

A survey of a half-century’s efforts to bring political criminals before the bench.

It’s a different world at the beginning of CNN legal analyst Honig’s history: A special counsel appointed to dissect the Watergate affair is fired by Nixon, to be succeeded by another counsel; with support from the Supreme Court, which rejects Nixon’s assertion of executive privilege, the counsel turns up enough smoking-gun evidence that Nixon is forced to resign. Even so, because that Nixon-era special counsel enjoyed no protections, one staffer said, “We were fighting an enormously powerful president, and we were getting signals that something bad was going to happen,” leading her to squirrel away evidence in case the investigation was shut down and redacted into oblivion. Since that time, various laws to protect special counsels have been enacted, but just as many have been allowed to expire, with politicians—especially Republicans like Robert Bork—worried that they occupied “an office whose sole function is to attack the executive branch.” Later successful investigations included the Valerie Plame affair, in which a member or members of George W. Bush’s team disclosed that she was a deep-cover CIA agent. Honig examines numerous cases through six criteria, including the necessity of an investigation, its duration and scope, and its results. One Trump 1–era investigation, in that regard, took three years to dismiss Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, then was contradicted by the contemporaneous Mueller report. An unexpected villain of the piece is President Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, who, by Honig’s account, dawdled for two years before allowing Jack Smith to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, so that “Smith had only a handful of months to get from indictment to trial—a difficult task in any federal case, let alone in two sweeping, unprecedented indictments of a former president.”

A warning of sorts, but also encouragement for those who would hold political leaders to account, immunity or no.