“The Right Side of History” is a podcast dedicated to exploring current events through a historical lens and busting left-wing myths about figures and events of America’s past.
On this week’s episode, we discuss investigations by special prosecutors, which didn’t start with Robert Mueller’s probe of President Donald Trump.
In 1875, President Ulysses Grant named the first special prosecutor to investigate the Whiskey Ring scandal and later fired him. Since then, several independent investigators—sometimes called special counsels, special prosecutors, or independent counsels—have been named to probe a presidential administration when a perceived conflict of interest occurs about the executive branch investigating itself.
These sleuths played a prominent role in key scandals ranging from Watergate to Monica Lewinsky. Click here to read about a history of special counsels. And listen as Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department lawyer, joins us to talk about these prosecutors through the years.
