Update: Merrick Garland named Jack Smith, pictured above, as special counsel. More soon.

Original post:

The big news of the day: We could get an announcement as early as this afternoon from Attorney General Merrick Garland that he is naming a special counsel to handle the various federal investigations of former President Trump.

The Wall Street Journal was the first I saw to report the news, but other Main Justice beat reporters have the same info.

We’ve discussed this before. But The Miami Herald now fleshes out the story. When Ron DeSantis’s administration hired Vertol Systems, a defense contractor, to run its migrant flights program, Vertol insisted on being paid up front for a package deal. That’s not how Florida works with contractors. But Vertol insisted and eventually the politicals in DeSantis’s administration overruled the state employees who manage payments to contractors. (It seems likely that that was done by the appointee running the program, Larry Keefe, who recommended Vetrol and used to be the company’s lawyer.)

Its such a bizarre thing. Elon Musk has owned Twitter for roughly three weeks and as of this morning the site seems to be limping forward, with widespread but inconsistent outages, because the inner functioning of the company has essentially imploded. Or rather Musk blew it up. Pretty much on a whim. Musk had already fired roughly half of the company’s workforce and at least temporarily scared off many of its corporate advertisers. Earlier this week he issued the remaining staff an ultimatum in which they had to choose between becoming truly ”hardcore,” working longer hours and weekends, or taking a small severance and leaving.

Apparently an unexpectedly large number chose to do the latter. Last night hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand of the remaining employees signed off for good, often with messages on Twitter itself, toasting their former workplace in a digital equivalent of a New Orleans funeral.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate talk elections, Republican infighting and the new Congress.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here