Could a Judge or Attorney General or Similar Start a New 9/11 investigation?

Question

On May 11th, 2018 a request was made by one of the many 9/11 for truth platforms which is endorsed by nearly 3000 architects and engineers to the US congress to reopen a new 9/11 investigation.

This is called the Bobby McIlvaine Act which acts in the name of many families who lost at least a relative during the 9/11 attacks. According to his platform over 100 representatives of congress have been reached in the past few weeks.

They are going to attempt the same thing this week but congress keeps ignoring the requests.

Would it be possible for a judge, lawyer, attorney general, etc. to start a new investigation or at least to subpoena the people who were in charge by that time, or is Congress the only way? Are there any other legal procedures to start a new investigation apart from Congress?

Answer 1

You don't really need any reasonable doubts about the currently available evidence to get it started. If an investigating authority thinks a crime has been committed and not yet been adjudicated, it is free to investigate, even if others disagree.

There are plenty of avenues for starting an investigation:

• Congress can exercise its oversight power to initiate an investigation. State legislatures can do the same, so you could petition the New York Legislature, the Virginia General Assembly, or the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
• At both the state and federal level, attorneys general have the authority to initiate an investigation of crimes committed within their jurisdictions.
• At both the state and federal level, a judge's authority to appoint a special prosecutor is a power considered to be inherent in the courts, so nearly any court could appoint someone to pursue the investigation. Of course, the prosecutor's authority could be jurisdictionally limited -- if a New York state judge appointed a prosecutor, he wouldn't really have much authority to investigate federal crimes, and if a small-claims court judge in Idaho appointed a prosecutor, he'd be limited by both his lack of authority to investigate events outside his jurisdiction and the practical difficulties of enforcing a subpoena from out of state.
• Even at the local level, law enforcement and legislative bodies have the authority to launch investigations. If NYPD or the Somerset County Sheriff or the Arlington County Board want to investigate, they could do so.
• I don't know what the relevant rules are in each jurisdiction, but some states allow lawsuits for civil damages based on criminal activity. So if the gist of the sponsor's complaint is that someone used "explosives and/or incendiaries" to kill his son, it may be that he could bring a lawsuit over that, which would in turn open up the the tools of civil discovery. Of course, that's only if the claim isn't time-barred; now that we're nearly 17 years out, I'd guess that it would be too late.
• And there's always the possibility of continuing an independent investigation. Using the same tools that the press uses -- interviews, freedom-of-information laws, etc. -- any member of the public is free to make an inquiry into any matter of public concern.

Obviously, I'd expect any of these authorities to be reluctant to take up the cause due to the investigatory consensus against the inside-job/cover-up theory, and I'd also expect -- for the same reason -- that any authority that tried to take it up would run into serious roadblocks from all the other authorities that have declined.