The committee chairman Henry Hyde has stated that he does not expect to extend the impeachment inquiry to encompass all the allegations examined by Prosecutor Kenneth Starr during his four year investigation. Starr has also looked at the alleged misuse of FBI files, campaign funding abuses and the Whitewater land deal, involved Clinton before he became President. In American criminal inquests, grand juries collect evidence to decide whether someone should be charged with a crime. They sit for 18 months. Trials tend to be public, but prosecutors and jurors on grand juries are legally prohibited from making public comments.
Witnesses are free to discuss their testimony.
The post was created in response to the Watergate scandal, before which all legal investigations were ultimately responsible to the president. It made it difficult to investigate the president, as the Watergate scandal demonstrated when Nixon sacked the special prosecutor Archibald Cox for investigating him. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law in a 1988 case, Morrison v. Olson, despite conservatives arguing that the law violates the constitutional separation of powers by infringing too much on the president's executive authority.