Philip Shenon, a former Washington and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation and A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.

The drumbeat is heard—again. After every national tragedy, or in the wake of a major political scandal or economic crisis, there are calls across Washington for creation of an independent, blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission to investigate. After Pearl Harbor, there was the Roberts Commission, named for its chairman, Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts. After the Kennedy assassination, there was the Warren Commission, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. After the 2001 terror attacks, the 9/11 Commission. After the 2008 financial meltdown, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Now, Democratic leaders in Congress—and a handful of Republicans—are urging creation of an independent commission to investigate Russian tampering in the 2016 presidential election and, more specifically and explosively, whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow. The prospects of an independent investigation seemed to grow after this week’s announcement by FBI Director James Comey that the bureau has opened a counterintelligence investigation of Trump aides for their possible ties to the Russian hacking operation that targeted Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The calls for an outside inquiry were louder still after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ stunning claim on Wednesday that some on the Trump transition team had been swept up in government surveillance of other targets.


In welcoming Comey’s disclosure, Adam Schiff of California, the House panel’s ranking Democrat, said that, beyond the inquiries in Congress and the FBI, it was time for creation of “an independent commission that can devote the staff and resources to this investigation that we do not have, and that can be completely removed from any political considerations.” Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly called for creation of a “9/11-style commission” to deal with allegations involving the Russians and the Trump campaign.

Having written histories of both the 9/11 Commission and the Warren Commission and after spending years poring over their long-secret archives, I think I speak with confidence in warning the Democrats to be careful what they wish for. Neither of those blue-ribbon investigations—especially the 9/11 Commission, most often cited by Schiff, Pelosi and their colleagues as a model for a Trump-Russia inquiry—offers much hope that an independent commission would accomplish the Democrats’ goals, at least not if those goals include getting to the bottom of this mess in a timely fashion and holding individuals accountable for their wrongdoing.

The 10-member 9/11 Commission, which was created by Congress over the initially fierce opposition of the Bush administration, is—accurately or not—held out as a gold standard for independent federal investigations. With its membership equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, it produced an elegantly written, unanimous report that documented the terrorist conspiracy behind the 2001 attacks and the larger history of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.

But it is worth remembering that the 9/11 Commission got started late and took a long time to finish—the investigation lasted 20 months, with its final report not issued until July 2004, more than 2½ years after the Twin Towers fell. The logistics of actually setting up that commission were akin to organizing a small federal agency from scratch, albeit one that required a staff of dozens of experts with the highest-level security clearances.

And the 9/11 Commission achieved bipartisan agreement only because the panel abandoned any attempt at individual accountability. The chairman, Tom Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and vice chairman Lee Hamilton, a retired Democratic congressman from Indiana, decided early on in the inquiry that they would avoiding singling out individual government officials for blame for their pre-9/11 bungling—and for their post-9/11 perjury and obstruction of justice, some contend—because the panel’s work would otherwise collapse in partisan squabbling. Like many of the families of victims at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I find it mind-boggling that, despite blistering incompetence by government officials who ignored evidence throughout 2001 that should have allowed them to foil the attacks, none of those officials were fired or disciplined, let alone prosecuted. Several of the most incompetent and dishonest among them even got big promotions after the commission’s report, including a number still on the government’s payroll.

And increasingly, as evidence continues to emerge from government intelligence archives, it is clear the 9/11 Commission failed on another key issue of accountability. The report was widely read as an exoneration of the government of Saudi Arabia, Washington’s supposed ally in the war on terror and home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, despite compelling evidence that at least some low-level Saudi officials were part of a support network for the 9/11 hijackers while they lived in the United States before the attacks. Just this week, families of 850 of the victims filed suit against Saudi Arabia in Federal District Court in Manhattan, charging that the Saudi government provided Al Qaeda with financial and other support.

(Maybe it goes without saying by now, but the Warren Commission is even less of a model for a Trump-Russia investigation, if only because it failed at its central mission of convincing the public of the truth about JFK’s murder. Opinion polls have shown consistently since the late 1960s that most Americans reject that panel’s finding that there was no conspiracy in the assassination. The Warren Commission’s investigation was not hindered directly by partisanship. But it was rushed, inadequately staffed and, as history has shown, denied vital evidence by the FBI and CIA, desperate to hide their own bungling before the assassination. Some of that evidence might have pointed to possible co-conspirators who had encouraged Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president.)

In investigating the allegations against the Russians and the Trump campaign, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are looking at other options for an independent inquiry. One obvious alternative, championed in the Senate by Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain of Arizona, is the creation of a special congressional committee, similar to the Senate Watergate Committee in the 1970s or to the joint House-Senate committee created after 9/11 to investigate intelligence failures before and after the terror attacks. On Wednesday, McCain told MSNBC that the partisan fight in Congress over the Russia allegations was a “bizarre situation” and proves “no longer does Congress have credibility to handle this” through regular channels of investigation.

In getting up and running, a special congressional committee would have obvious advantages over an independent commission, especially since many lawmakers and their staffs already have the needed security clearances and can obtain secure office space to begin an investigation without delay. The congressional 9/11 committee, which began work almost immediately after the attacks, could be a model in other ways. Years later, the members of that special House-Senate panel—its full name was a mouthful: the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001—point with pride to that investigation, which completed the bulk of its work within a year of 9/11, before the independent 9/11 commission had even opened its doors. At a time of intense politically inspired finger-pointing over the attacks, the lawmakers say, the joint committee produced a final report that contained virtually all of the information found in the much-ballyhooed 9/11 Commission report two years later.

But would that structure really work given the even more poisonous partisanship of Washington in 2017? And are there lawmakers in Congress independent enough to lead a credible investigation? The Republican chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who might normally be expected to run a joint investigation, were members of the Trump White House transition team. And Nunes in particular has repeatedly suggested that there is little to investigate in the swirl of allegations about Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign—apart from an inquiry into how classified information about those ties was leaked to reporters.

That leaves one other likely route for an independent investigation: appointment of a special federal prosecutor, a move the Trump White House would probably see as the worst possible outcome. Its alarm would be justified. The track record of special prosecutors—notably in Watergate, Iran-Contra and, most recently, in the investigation of the leak of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame by Bush administration officials—is that they often do pursue criminal indictments in grand jury investigations that drag on for years.

By tradition, the initial decision to appoint a special prosecutor is made at the Justice Department. In this case, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has already recused himself from the investigation of the Russian-Trump allegations, given his role as a key strategist in the Trump campaign and his awkwardly belated acknowledgment of meetings last year with the Russian ambassador to Washington. That means the decision would likely be left to Deputy Attorney General-designate Rod Rosenstein, a career federal prosecutor who has been praised by Democrats and Republicans alike. Rosenstein is awaiting confirmation by the Senate. Assuming he gets the job, he may show up for work at the Justice Department later this spring and immediately face the biggest decision of his career: whether to subject the Trump administration to a criminal investigation—and regular headlines about subpoenas, grand juries, plea negotiations and even indictments and convictions—that could last at least as long as Trump is in the White House.

But would the naming of special prosecutor tamp down the leak-fueled frenzy—and, Democrats would argue, the well-justified distress—over the possibility that the president’s political operatives conspired with Russian hackers to try to steal last year’s election? Almost certainly not. Partisans in the House and Senate will want to keep their hands in the investigation of the Russian connection, whether through a joint legislative committee or an independent commission that Congress creates. The Trump White House needs to brace itself for the possibility of multiple, competing investigations, with the president’s fate in the hands of investigators who will be coming at him from all sides, many of whom he will be powerless to control.