Ben Wittes
speaker
379 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Ben Wittes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And the special counsel was toast from 2000 and from 2000 when the independent counsel law expired.
And, you know, the president could have fired Bob Mueller.
for any reason he wanted or no reason at all.
And he chose not to and would have had to direct the attorney general or the deputy attorney general to do it.
But it was always an option, right?
And it was something that he was contemplated and didn't do only for political reasons.
So the real question that these cases raise is not about
inspectors general or the senior level people.
The real question is about junior level people.
The traditional way of understanding the president's appointment power
and therefore his firing power, is that every principal officer, if you run an agency, if you're a political appointee, if you have Senate confirmation, right, you have to be fireable by the president.
But below a certain level, what are called inferior officers, Congress has a lot of authority to create other appointment mechanisms for them.
So for example,
A U.S.
attorney can be appointed by the court in the local jurisdiction under certain circumstances.
The civil service can have protection against firing without cause that you could never give to an agency head.
And this opinion is careful not to prejudge the question of whether all these civil service protections are actually vapor.
And I think that's the risk.
And so to go back to a different Comey, Maureen Comey was fired as a as, you know, Jelaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein's prosecutor.
Epstein was already dead, but she was fired because literally the paperwork said because Article two.
Showing 241–260 of 379 · page 13 of 19
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