is a senior faculty member at The George Washington University School of Law in Washington, where he is associate dean for public-interest and public-service law. During a wide-ranging interview Tuesday with Voice of America, he spoke about the current political debate in the United States swirling around pending investigations of official wrongdoing.
Morrison discussed how and under what principles the U.S. government conducts high-level investigations of official misconduct, citing examples from recent political history and relating how this all is relevant to the current turbulent political climate in Washington. Looking back as far as the Watergate scandal of about 45 years ago, and at incidents as recent as the claim by President Donald Trump that his predecessor, Barack Obama, ordered "wiretapping" of Trump's campaign organization, Morrison has a cautious view.
Basically confident that the American political system is resilient enough to withstand extraordinary pressure, Morrison says in the current circumstances, Americans — from members of Congress to the public — "should start slowly ... and find out what the facts are." He adds: "I don't think we're at a crisis yet. ... We should see what happens and we'll proceed from there."
Here's a transcript of VOA's interview with Alan Morrison:
We were very fortunate for the first 225 years [of U.S. history] not to have that problem. Then Richard Nixon became the president and we had Watergate. And since that time, I think, people have been very concerned about these ethical issues involving the president and the people who work for him. And so it is a big concern now to everybody, and I think people in the administration want to be sure that everybody views them as being above board.
We should separate the sensitive investigation following [the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001], where there was no allegation of criminal violations [by national leaders], from those involving Watergate, Iran-Contra and perhaps even today. So in the [September 11 case], the idea was to get to the bottom of what happened and why; nobody was going to be accused of doing anything that could send them to jail. And in that situation, the powers-that-be appointed independent people, former government officials, members of Congress, and they had a staff, they conducted an investigation.
That's not quite what we think is going to happen here, because there are allegations that there may have been criminal violations including perjury — people not telling truth. And so something else is being at least looked at at this time. The problem here is that under our system, the federal government has ... The attorney general is appointed by the president of the United States and could be fired by the president at will, meaning for no reason at all — or for a bad reason, even.
And so the concern is that if the attorney general is investigating the president or his associates, he may hold back and not go after the president or others because of loyalty, or for fear of losing his job. So in a number of situations there have been special prosecutors appointed. This was started when Richard Nixon appointed Archibald Cox, and then fired him, and then appointed Leon Jaworski [whose work] ultimately led to the conviction of a number of people in the Nixon White House. President Nixon resigned, and everybody agreed that that was the situation in which a special prosecutor was needed.
Congress had passed the law to regularize the process of appointing independent counsels, as they were called, but that led to some other problems. Too many counsels were appointed, they stayed too long, they investigated too harshly, and so Congress decided to not extend that law after it expired in the mid-1990s. And the result is that now, if there's going to be an independent counsel appointed, it has to be done by the attorney general. That happened recently with the George W. Bush administration, when there were questions about whether there were some leaks of classified information from the White House. The deputy attorney general appointed a former U.S. attorney from Chicago as the special counsel, the investigations went forward and one of [then-Vice President Dock Cheney's] key advisers, Scooter Libby, was indicted. [Libby] ultimately was convicted and then given a commutation of his sentence.