The New York Times writes a dreadfully earnest “open” letter1 to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein beseeching him, “[a]t this fraught moment”, in light of his “sterling reputation”—“including a 27-year career in the Justice Department under five administrations, and the distinction of being the longest-serving United States attorney in history”—yada, yada, yada to basically “save us” [my language] by appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the “Russian connection”—that vast web of illicit deals connecting Trumpland to Putinistan, and, thus, to, well “save us.”
Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, New York Times, but that ship has sailed. Rod Rosenstein has already bitten the apple, or, to vary the metaphor, kissed Donald Trump’s ass at high noon in Macy’s window.2 Rod’s three-page “memo”, as has already been duly reported, is a three-page disgrace: “Instead of a sober, carefully substantiated, and authoritative assessment of the FBI Director’s conduct, we are presented with a string of quotations, plucked out of context and clipped together for rhetorical effect,” Daphna Renan (Harvard Law) and David Posen (Columbia) tell us over at “Lawfare”. For a man in Rosenstein’s position to put his name to such a document at the request of a man like, you know, Donald Trump, well, game over. Rod Rosenstein is not an honorable man.
