US Attorney General Barr's screwing up of the US Attorney's Office in DC as a justification for spinning off local prosecutions

This building houses the US Attorney's Office for DC.

Because DC is a federal district, not a state, the US Attorney's Office, which in other federal prosecution districts (like the Southern District of New York) only handles federal criminal matters, handles local prosecutions of adults.

It's a great training ground for the Department of Justice, but at some level, the office can be disconnected from the local jurisdiction. By contrast, in most other cities the local prosecutor is publicly elected, and therefore, more connected to the issues and concerns of the voting population.

I have written a bunch of entries over the years, in support of creating a locally elected AG, and that office building the justification for the devolution of local prosecution authority to the local AG.

DC has a locally elected AG now, but there doesn't seem to be any traction wrt devolving local adult prosecutions to that office.

-- "Executive Power vs. the will of the people and the DC Attorney General," 2015
-- "Politico Magazine profile of DC AG Karl Racine | + some miscellaneous legal matters," 2019

More recently, the DC US Attorney's Office has been through a lot of turmoil because of Executive Branch interference in the prosecutions of Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort and the machinations concerning the appointment of a US Attorney to run the office.

The National Law Journal reports ("Inside the Disharmony at the DC Federal Prosecutor's Office") that there is a great deal of unrest within the office because of this ("A Loss to the Pursuit of Justice': Praise for Roger Stone Prosecutor Who Resigned").

Granted the disharmony is more about the prosecution of federal crimes, and the way the office positions are used to reward political functionaries, who at least under the current administration, tend to have zero experience or connection to DC.

So it's possible that this isn't affecting much the part of the office that does local prosecutions.

But it does provide further justification for splitting off and devolving local matters to the locally elected AG.

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The Federal AG should be popularly elected.  Separately, because "law belongs to the people, not the president" for a long time I've argued that the US Attorney General, who heads the Department of Justice, should be popularly elected, separate from the election of the President/Vice President.

The way that President Trump has used the law as a cudgel, and his pardon and suasion capacity to shape "justice" his way is yet another example of why to do this, although my argument about this predates Trump's election.

-- "Yet another example of why the US Attorney General should be popularly elected," 2020
-- "Ideally, the Federal Attorney General would be separately elected," 2017

I suppose knowing about how President Nixon misused the AG's power, and even President Kennedy appointing his brother, are other examples of why some disconnection of the criminal justice function from the President's power would be desirable.