# Independent Counsel The **independent counsel** was a prosecutor appointed not by the executive branch but by a **three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit**, on application by the [[Attorney General]], to investigate high-level executive-branch wrongdoing. Created as Title VI of the [[Ethics in Government Act]] of 1978 (Pub. L. 95-521) in the wake of the [[Saturday Night Massacre]], the office was originally called "special prosecutor" and renamed independent counsel in 1983. The statute was upheld 7–1 in [[Morrison v. Olson]] (1988), Chief Justice Rehnquist writing, with Justice Scalia dissenting alone. It required periodic reauthorization, lapsed once between December 1992 and June 1994, and — after the Starr investigation made it politically radioactive on both sides — was allowed to sunset for good on **June 30, 1999** by its own terms at 28 U.S.C. § 599. It was never reauthorized. Sections 591–599 remain printed in Title 28 and are inoperative. Nine days after the lapse, Attorney General [[Janet Reno]] promulgated **28 C.F.R. Part 600**, creating the [[Special Counsel]] as an internal Department substitute. What the statute had made judicially enforceable, the regulation made discretionary: appointment by the [[Attorney General]] rather than a court, jurisdiction set inside the Department, no required public report, and no rights enforceable by anyone. ## The roster and what it taught Twenty independent counsels were appointed in twenty-one years. Two defined the office. **Lawrence Walsh** (1986–93) investigated the [[Iran-Contra Affair]] for six years, won convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter that were overturned on immunity grounds, indicted Caspar Weinberger — and watched George H. W. Bush pardon Weinberger and five others on Christmas Eve 1992, in what Walsh called the completion of the cover-up. **[[Kenneth Starr]]** (1994–99) began with Whitewater and ended with the Lewinsky referral (the [[Starr Report]]) and the [[Clinton Impeachment]], four years and some $70 million later, having become in the public mind the model of an unbounded prosecutor. Walsh taught Republicans that the statute could be turned on a President's inner circle; Starr taught Democrats the same thing. By 1999 neither party would reauthorize a mechanism both had been burned by, and Janet Reno told Congress it should die. ## For and against revival The case for revival is the record since: [[Special Counsel]]s serve at the Attorney General's pleasure, their reports are the Attorney General's to release, and the Barr summary of the [[Mueller Report]], the Durham investigation and the 2025 [[Weaponization Working Group]] each showed what a Department-controlled prosecutor can and cannot do. The case against is *Morrison* itself — [[Antonin Scalia]]'s lone dissent, arguing that a prosecutor no one elected and no one could fire was a fourth branch, is now the majority view of a Court that in *[[Trump v. Slaughter]]* (2026) has made removal protection unconstitutional for far more than prosecutors. The statute could not be re-enacted today and survive. That leaves the vault's conclusion on the [[Special Counsel]] page: the constraint on a President who controls the Justice Department was always political, and the independent-counsel era was the one interval in which it was briefly something else. ## See Also - [[Special Counsel Appointment and Removal Flow]] — the crosswalk between the two regimes - [[Special Counsel]] — the regulatory successor - [[Ethics in Government Act]] · [[Morrison v. Olson]] - [[Watergate Scandal]] · [[Saturday Night Massacre]] · [[Kenneth Starr]]