Independent Counsels

Two Senate Democrats are calling on Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate lobbyist Jack Abramoff's activities in two Pacific island territories. In a letter made public Thursday, Sens. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Ken Salazar of Colorado also asked Gonzales to provide the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with a secret Justice Department report on security risks in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The Obama administration Monday set the country on a course to confront whether actions taken in the name of defending Americans instead crossed criminal lines. In simultaneous moves, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. opened an investigation into whether CIA interrogators broke the law and the administration complied with a judge's order and released a long-secret CIA report that cataloged allegations of agency prisoner abuse. The administration also released memos sought in recent months by former Vice President Dick Cheney that he argued attest to the success of the CIA's controversial methods, but that appeared inconclusive in part because the agency had blacked out large portions of the memos.

The reputation of Patrick J. Fitzgerald was well-known to colleagues, defense lawyers and others long before he brought criminal charges against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the CIA leak investigation: meticulous, aggressive, intense and, most of all, by-the-book. All those traits were on public display Friday as the special prosecutor delineated his reasons for seeking Libby's indictment by a federal grand jury. The same traits were also on display in the charges themselves.

With U.S. troops unable to find expected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a group of officials met aboard Air Force Two in mid-2003 to discuss how to respond to the growing prominence of one particular critic of President Bush's war policy. Vice President Dick Cheney was on the flight. So was his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. It was a scene that suggested intrigue.

Bowing to pressure at home and abroad, the Mexican government Friday installed a special prosecutor to investigate the unsolved killings of hundreds of women over the last 11 years in Ciudad Juarez. The swearing-in of Maria Lopez Uribe, 40, who has served as a federal prosecutor in several Mexican states, ended months of insistence by President Vicente Fox and his aides that the series of homicides in the border city is primarily a matter of state, not federal, jurisdiction.

Six months after it was created, a special commission to look into how the Los Angeles Police Department reacted to the Rampart corruption scandal was approved Monday by a City Council committee. The commission was created by the Los Angeles Police Commission, at the request of Police Chief William J. Bratton, and will consider whether the LAPD adequately investigated itself after allegations by former Officer Rafael Perez about widespread illegality and criminal conduct by police officers.

Gov. Mitt Romney on Thursday filed emergency legislation that would permit him to hire a special counsel to keep Massachusetts from becoming the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. The Republican governor said he would ask the special counsel to petition the state's highest court to delay enactment of a ruling that on May 17 will permit gays and lesbians to wed here.

The independent counsel who spent $9 million to get a misdemeanor plea from former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros nearly four years ago is still in business -- although he has promised to bring his now nearly $19-million probe to a close soon. "We're wrapping it up," said David Barrett, the lawyer and lobbyist who was selected in 1995 to look into whether Cisneros had lied about how much money he had given a former mistress.

Dissatisfied with the job that Los Angeles police did investigating their own corrupt officers, the Los Angeles Police Commission will name prominent civil rights attorney Connie Rice to head a fully independent commission to review the 1999 Rampart scandal. Rice will lead a seven-member Rampart panel charged with judging whether the department has corrected mistakes that allowed the scandal to occur, Commission President Rick Caruso said. The other members will be announced next month.

When members of Congress let the independent counsel law expire after a string of scandals in the 1980s and 1990s, Democrats and Republicans alike were happy to see it go. Now, the flap over a suspected national security leak from the White House is shaping up as the first big test of how to investigate the executive branch since the much-maligned law died. And already, a whole new set of problems is emerging.