Jack Smith, a former federal prosecutor, was named as the special counsel for two pending criminal investigations by the Department of Justice.
Smith was appointed three days after Trump said he would run for president in four years.
Garland appointed a special counsel after Trump moved.
Smith will handle a case about whether Trump broke the law when he removed hundreds of documents from the White House and then lied about it.
A mob of Trump supporters rioted in the Capitol in January.
Smith was the former chief prosecutor for the special court in the Netherlands. He was investigating war crimes in Kosovo.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump claps as he announces that he will once again run for U.S. president in the 2024 U.S. presidential election during an event at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, November 15, 2022.The appointment was made public by the DOJ.
Garland said it was in the public interest to appoint a special prosecutor to independently manage an investigation and prosecution based on recent developments including the former president's announcement that he is a candidate for president in the next election.
The attorney general was confident that the appointment wouldn't slow down the investigations.
Garland said he would make sure the Special Counsel got the resources to do the work quickly.
Concerns that Garland would have a conflict of interest if he were to make a decision on whether or not Trump should be indicted were alleviated by the appointment of a special counsel. President Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election and appointed the attorney general.
There is a chance that Biden will face Trump again in the next election.
A White House official told NBC News on Friday that the Department of Justice makes its own decisions about criminal investigations and that they are not involved.
In a Time magazine article on Thursday, Barbara McQuade, an NBC News legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, argued against the idea of a special counsel being appointed in the Trump probes.
McQuade wrote that it was impractical to appoint a special counsel.
Delay will be created by appointing a new lawyer to investigate. She wrote that a new lawyer would need time to get up to speed.
If Trump wants to regain the Oval Office, the DOJ needs to finish the investigations and trials before January 20, 2025. When a new president could take the ultimate act of partisanship in prosecution and pardon himself.
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