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There have been at least eight occasions when a Special Counsel has been appointed by a President to investigate such occurrences. The first time that a president appointed a special counsel, he wound up firing him. In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant named a special prosecutor to investigate a ring of corrupt officials in what became known as the "Whiskey Ring" scandal. Grant appointed General John Brooks Henderson (a former U.S. Senator from Missouri) to serve as special prosecutor in charge of the indictments and trials, but Grant later fired Henderson for challenging Grant's interference in the prosecutions.
James Garfield appointed a special prosecutor to look into corruption in the Post Office, a probe that continued during the term of Garfield's successor, Chester Alan Arthur. President Calvin Coolidge also appointed a special prosecutor to look into the "Teapot Dome" scandal, in which several associates Coolidge's predecessor, Warren Harding, were found to have profited personally from sweetheart deals with oil companies.
President Harry Truman faced pressure from Congress to name a special prosecutor to investigate corruption in the IRS (then called the Bureau of Internal Revenue), but instead, he had his attorney general named a special assistant to report to him. The special assistant, Newbold Morris, sent an very thorough questionnaire to administration officials, and for that he was fired by the attorney general.
The Watergate burglary of 1972 in which the Democratic National Committee headquarters was broken into, led to a connection with the White House of President Richard Nixon, thanks to a series of stories in The Washington Post. Nixon found himself unable to deflect pressure for an independent investigation and during his 1973 confirmation hearing to be attorney general, Elliot Richardson promised to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the matter. That special prosecutor, law professor Archibald Cox, later issued a subpoena for the tape recordings Nixon had made of his Oval Office conversations. The confrontation over those tapes led Nixon to direct Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused to do and later resigned. Richardson's deputy also resigned, and the series of weekend departures came to be known as the "Saturday night massacre." Public demand forced Nixon to name a new special prosecutor to replace Cox with Leon Jaworksi, who wound up charging a number of high-level White House personnel and naming Nixon himself an "unindicted co-conspirator." Nixon resigned the Presidency in August of that year.
The next instance of a special prosecutor being appointed occurred in 1986, when news stories reported the administration of Ronald Reagan had sold American weapons to its regime to facilitate the release of U.S. hostages and that the money from the transaction had been used to fund a covert guerrilla operation in Central America aimed at overthrowing the government in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scheme prompted a protracted congressional investigation, which hindered the work of an independent counsel named Lawrence Walsh. Walsh would eventually indict former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, former national security adviser John Poindexter and National Security Council staffer Oliver North. Weinberger received a pardon before trial from President George H.W. Bush. Poindexter and North were convicted but had their convictions reversed.
The independent counsel law was next used to investigate Democratic President Bill Clinton. The investigation began to look into a controversy stemming from investments that Clinton and his wife, Hillary, had made in an Arkansas real estate venture known as Whitewater. After Clinton took office, the controversy continued and he asked his attorney general, Janet Reno, to appoint an independent counsel. She named Robert Fiske, a respected Republican litigator, who built a case against several other Arkansans involved in the deal but not the Clintons. In 1994, a panel of three judges on the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia named a new independent counsel. The judges picked Kenneth Starr, a former judge and Bush administration solicitor general, to take over Fiske's investigation. Starr never indicted the Clintons for their role in Whitewater, but he became aware of allegations of sexual misconduct by the president from the time when he was governor of Arkansas. This led to information about a young woman named Monica Lewinsky who, while an intern in the White House in the mid-1990s, had a sexual affair with Clinton during the time he was president. Clinton's efforts to deny the accusations led to accusations of perjury and obstruction of justice, leading to his impeachment by the House of Representatives in late 1998.Clinton was tried by the Senate in early 1999. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist presided over the proceedings. But in the end there were not nearly enough votes to meet the two-thirds vote required for removal.
The Special Counsel investigation of Donald Trump involved an investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and alleged links between Trump associates and Russian officials. The special prosecutor Robert Mueller conducted his investigation from May 2017 to March 2019. Prior to the appointment of the Special Counsel, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been investigating activities by Russian operatives and by members of the Trump presidential campaign, under the code name "Crossfire Hurricane".
In May 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller, a former FBI director, to take over the FBI's work. The investigation's scope included allegations of "links and/or coordination" between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign. Mueller was also authorized to pursue "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation," including potential obstruction of justice charges against President Trump and members of his campaign or his administration.
The investigation was officially concluded on March 22, 2019, with the Mueller Report submitted to Attorney General William Barr. A redacted version of the report was released to the public on April 18, 2019. The report concluded that the Internet Research Agency's social media campaign supported Trump's presidential candidacy while attacking Clinton's, and Russian intelligence hacked and released damaging material from the Clinton campaign and various Democratic Party organizations. The investigation "identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign", and concluded that the Trump campaign "expected it would benefit electorally" from Russian hacking efforts. The investigation did not "establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities".
On potential obstruction of justice by President Trump, the report said that the investigation "does not conclude that the President committed a crime". However, the report also said that the investigation "does not exonerate" President Trump and said that it found both public and private actions "by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations". The report left it to Congress to decide whether President Trump had obstructed justice.
Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had authorized the Mueller probe, decided on March 24, 2019, that the evidence was insufficient to establish a finding of obstruction of justice.