The Only Way to Restore Trust in the NSA
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This is a political problem that needs a political answer. Special prosecutors are political and always have been, but I really have difficultly seeing how one could be imbued with enough power.
This sure sounds to me like a job for the nation's Grant Inquisitor, AKA the Congress, as we saw the last time this happened with the Church Committee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
Given how the first and only vote on this issue, the House's Amash Amendment was both close and critically didn't break out on any particular set of conventional lines, like party or region, I say it's way to early to count it out. Not that we don't need to send a variety of Congresscritters back home to spend more time with their families, and as a part of that change the leadership, even if we can't necessarily remove Boehner and Pelosi from their seats. I.e. we need to make it politically impossible for our representatives to keep them and their ilk in the leadership.
Helped that we were fighting an in your face existential threat, the Evil Empire AKA the Soviet Union with their 45,000 (sic) nuclear warhead inventory peak in 1988 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_weapons_of_mass_des...). I in fact supplied a reference for a student acquaintance applying for a job at the NSA in that year.