Noah Feldman writes:

The Department of Justice must investigate Rudy Giuliani’s potential crimes in trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election. It also needs to investigate whether White House officials criminally covered up evidence of Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

And because the whistle-blower complaint alleges that the top law enforcement official in the federal government, Attorney General William Barr, “appears to be involved” in these events, a special counsel must be appointed. Barr obviously must recuse himself: He has a conflict of interest and, more to the point, he is a potential target of the criminal investigation. (A Justice Department spokeswoman has said Barr was unaware of Trump’s call with Zelenskiy until a whistle-blower’s complaint about it was forwarded to the agency in late August, and that Barr never discussed with Trump investigating former Vice President Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine.)

To be clear, Congress should not wait on the results of this special counsel investigation to continue its own inquiries. That’s unnecessary, because Congress is appropriately focused on whether Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors, not on whether anyone else may have committed a federal crime. It would also obviously be absurd to put a hold on the congressional inquiry to wait for a Department of Justice investigation to conclude.

But a special investigation is needed because Congress does not have the expertise or the jurisdiction to go after criminal conduct by Giuliani, a private citizen. Nor could it investigate Barr’s conduct in any context other than the separate impeachment inquiry into Trump.

These investigations need federal prosecutors and FBI agents. And they need them right now. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday said that Attorney General William P. Barr had “gone rogue,” and questioned whether he could objectively make decisions about legal action in response to an explosive whistle-blower complaint accusing President Trump of misconduct, because Mr. Barr himself was mentioned in the document.

“I do think the attorney general has gone rogue,” Ms. Pelosi said on CNN. “He has for a long time now. And since he was mentioned in all of this, it’s curious that he would be making decisions about how the complaint would be handled.”

Earlier Friday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ms. Pelosi accused the White House of “a cover-up of the cover-up,” referring to the July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in which Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Zelensky to investigate a political opponent, and the ensuing effort to keep the call from going public. [Continue reading…]