The New York Times has a long article, ”‘Shaken” Rosenstein Felt Used by White House in Comey Firing’”, by Michael Schmidt and Adam Goldman, that leaves me a little, you know, shaken but not stirred. Because what is the deal with Rod Rosenstein?
Two weeks after being sworn in as deputy attorney general, Rosenstein writes a three-page, half-assed memo stating, among other things that, “The way the Director [FBI Director James Comey] handled the conclusion of the email investigation [of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton] was wrong. As a result, the F.B.I. is unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a Director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them. Having refused to admit his errors, the Director cannot be expected to implement the necessary corrective actions.”
Rosenstein faulted Comey for the following actions:
- Announcing that Clinton would not be prosecuted: “It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement. At most, the Director should have said that the F.B.I. had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors.”
- “Compounding the error, the Director ignored another longstanding principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation. The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.
- “Concerning his letter to Congress on October 28, 2016, the Director cast his decision as a choice between whether he would ‘speak’ about the decision to investigate the newly-discovered email messages or ‘conceal’ it. ‘Conceal’ is a loaded term that misstates the issue. When federal agents and prosecutors quietly open a criminal investigation, we are not concealing anything; we are simply following the longstanding policy that we refrain from publicizing non-public information. In that context, silence is not concealment.”
Rosenstein presented his statements as, in effect, a summation of bipartisan outrage: “Almost everyone agrees that the Director [FBI Director James Comey] made serious mistakes: it is one of the few issues that that unites people of diverse perspectives.” Which rather ignores the fact that “people of diverse perspectives” like Donald “Lock Her Up” Trump furiously accused Comey of being too soft on Clinton, while then Sen. Jeff Sessions, soon to be Rosenstein’s boss, thought that Comey got it just right. Was Rosenstein supremely ingenuous, taking if for granted that “everyone” agreed with him, or supremely disingenuous, knowingly concealing the diametrically opposing opinions concerning Comey’s actions under the artful phrase, “serious mistakes”? And how likely was it that he was “supremely ingenuous” when he knew he was being asked to write this memo to justify the unprecedented dismissal of an FBI director taken in secret by the most blatantly corrupt and vicious man ever to occupy the presidency?
After the firestorm broke, Rosenstein claimed to be bewildered and outraged by the fact that Sessions citted his memo as the justification for dismissing Comey, a patently ridiculous lie. Rosenstein pathetically claimed afterwards that his memo, with its sweeping statement of conclusions regarding the need for replacing Comey, somehow was not an “investigation” nor was it written to justify Comey’s dismissal. What was it then, a mere bureaucratic musing, a random dithyrambic rambling, such as any deputy attorney general might write, for no reason at all, really, to be forwarded to first the Attorney General of the United States and then the President? Was Rosenstein mad because the dagger he forged still bore his fingerprints? Was that the problem?1
Left unmentioned by the Times article is another notable instance of Rosensteinian bureaucratic backstabbing, his decision to release to House Republicans, and thus to the world, the private emails of unfortunately talkative FBI agent Peter Strozk and FBI attorney Lisa Page back in 2017, which were also discussed in the recent report on the FBI by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.2
Yet Rosenstein is also the guy who appointed Robert Mueller independent prosecutor for the Trump campaign’s Russian connection. Rosenstein is also the guy who stands up to the hysterical yammerings of House Republicans without flinching. I don’t feel sorry for Rosenstein for the heat he got, and deserved, for his role in Comey’s dismissal, and I believe he demeans himself for seeking sympathy. He seems, in his own, quiet way, as self-indulgently self-righteous as a man he clearly does not like, James Comey. But most of the time—and I have to emphasize the word “most” here (a lot)—he serves as an aggressive buffer to both Donald Trump and the howling wolves that form the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, a group that is doing almost as much to destroy the rule of law in the United States as Trump himself.
- When Rosenstein was asked to write the memo, he knew that the decision to fire Comey had already been made. Last year, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes, writing in Lawfare, examined Rosenstein’s less than convincing “explanation” in some detail. ↩︎
- Wittes cocks a similarly cold eye on this instance of Rosenstein’s instinct for self-preservation. ↩︎
