The executive power includes the authority to oversee prosecutions, but it would be ludicrous, as the letter implies, to think the president can self-pardon.
A telephone hot line to receive complaints is scheduled to start at the end of the month, along with new federal and state commissions to monitor complaints and oversee prosecutions.
The most high-profile among those barred is Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, who oversaw prosecution of the Bout case.
Ms Ny is also head of the department that oversees prosecution of sex crimes in particular.
After the election of George HW Bush in 1988, Mueller, a lifelong Republican, moved to the justice department in Washington, in short order taking charge of the criminal division, where he oversaw prosecutions of the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the Pan Am flight 103 bombing suspects and organized crime cases.
One of the four executive orders that Obama signed effectively cancelled seven years of controversial Justice Department legal opinions authorizing methods of treating terror suspects so brutal that even a top Bush Administration official overseeing prosecutions at Guantánamo, Susan Crawford, recently admitted that they amounted to torture.
From 2011 to 2014, Pineau was chief of staff to the Baltimore City state's attorney and a special assistant state's attorney, overseeing prosecutions, trying cases and working on a variety of policy, legal, and operational issues.
As Attorney-General, Cross was responsible for overseeing prosecutions.
Bharara is charged with overseeing prosecutions against Wall Street and has brought down multiple high profile New York elected officials on corruption charges while in office.
Although the court's workings are secret, Mr. Mortazavi, known as a hard-line conservative, would be the one to at least oversee the prosecution of both cases.
