The future of Rod Rosenstein in question

Correction and update: A previous version of this article indicated that Rosenstein was absent, citing reports from other media. The article is now updated as news unfolds.

According to several reports, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein resigned or at least considered resigning. Other reports indicate that he hopes to be fired after a meeting at the White House on Monday. However, he remains uncertain if Rosenstein will be off work at the end of the day.

The White House and the Justice Department have not yet made an official statement on this issue and have not responded immediately to Vox's requests for comment.

Contradictory news comes three days after the New York Times announced that the Deputy Attorney General had said he wanted to record conversations with President Donald Trump last year, and also discussed the use of the 25th Amendment to fire the President. . Rosenstein denied the report and a source told the Times that Rosenstein had simply joked.

If Rosenstein is endangered, this is very important news.

Rosenstein is the man responsible for overseeing Mueller's investigation into a possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 US presidential election. That's because Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Rosenstein's boss , recused himself from the investigation after it turned out that he had provided Congress with false and misleading testimony about his own contacts with Russia.

Rosenstein has spent more than a year walk on a delicate tightrope.

On the one hand, he pledged to protect the Conservative inquiry inside and outside of Congress, who thought it was biased against the president and urged Trump to fire the special council. But Rosenstein could not defend the investigation too much or he was drawing Trump's irony.

The possible departure of Rosenstein would be at the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation because Mueller must make important investigative decisions before the Deputy Attorney General. Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who would replace Rosenstein if he left, could simply refuse to approve Mueller's requests. It would slow down the entire investigation – or lead to Mueller's ouster if he thought there was a reason to do so.

Rosenstein had refused to do it. Instead, he let Mueller's investigation go unhindered, while Mueller indicted key members of the Trump campaign, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, on accusations of tax, financial and banking fraud. . Manafort later pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy against the United States and to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice and now cooperates with the investigation. Mueller.

The future of the Mueller probe, and perhaps even the Trump presidency, depends on how Rosenstein achieved his delicate balance.

Rosenstein must keep Trump and the Justice Department happy. It was not easy.

Rosenstein's performance at a congressional hearing last December showed that he had to deal with the difficult situation he faced.

Here is what happened: On the night of December 12, just hours before Rosenstein testified at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee of the House, the Justice Department showed reporters anti-Trump texts. The messages came from two FBI officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who had corresponded throughout the 2016 presidential election.

Strzok, a former senior FBI counterintelligence officer who was part of Mueller's investigation team, sent a message to Page that Trump was a "fool". 0. "

There was also a text that apparently implied that Strzok and Page were working on an "insurance policy" in case Trump won the election. But the Wall Street Journal reported on December 18 that Strzok's text really concerned the need to investigate possible links between Trump and Russia. Mueller dismissed Strzok from his staff last July, and Strzok-Page's exchanges are still undergoing an internal investigation by the Department of Justice. Yet some conservatives inside and outside the government think these texts show that Mueller's investigation was working against the president.

It is unclear whether Rosenstein authorized the publication of the texts, but some legal analysts thought that the DOJ had sent the public message the night before Rosenstein's grand audience to draw the attention of the anti-Mueller crowd to the Committee. Judiciary of the Chamber.

"It's a terrible behavior of the department," said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the Obama administration's Justice Department, at Business Insider about publishing the texts at the US Department of Justice. time. "This is an ongoing investigation in which these employees have procedural rights and the political leaders of the DOJ have thrown them to the wolves so that Rosenstein can obtain Republican credits at his hearing."

Rosenstein defended the publication of the texts at the hearing, saying: "We consulted with the Inspector General to determine that there was no objection to the publication of the documents", in response to a question about the texts of Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) "If he did, we would not have published it," Rosenstein said.

But he also defended Mueller in this same session. The committee's representative, Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), asked Rosenstein the most anticipated question of the session: "If you were ordered today to fire Mr. Mueller, what would you do?

"If there was a good cause, I would act. If there was no good cause, I would not do it, "replied Rosenstein. He then continued to defend Mueller personally, saying, "It would have been hard to find anyone more qualified for this job."

These exchanges show that Rosenstein was trying to defend the probe while appeasing Trump and his allies. Benjamin Wittes, an expert in national security law at the Brookings Institution, wrote on the Lawfare blog that Rosenstein could pay a price for both.

"Rosenstein has at least contributed to [the political] circus – at the expense of his own employees, "he wrote after the hearing. "The DOJ and FBI work forces will not forget it. They should not either.

These 24 hours encompassed Rosenstein's two political stages. One minute, he defended the publication of texts that served as ammunition to Mueller's critics and Trump's allies to launch an investigation. the next day he protected Mueller from critics of those even anti-Mueller conservatives and Trump allies – and put his own work in danger.

Keeping both sides happy has allowed Rosenstein to affirm that he supported his staff while supporting Trump. The Deputy Attorney General played a clever game, and those who had worked with him thought they could do it.

"What you have in Rod is a proven person," said Julie Myers Wood, Rosenstein's attorney and former colleague, in an interview last December, months before Rosenstein was ousted. "I can not think of anyone who is better prepared than he is to handle this situation."

On May 1, Rosenstein told a crowd that "the Department of Justice will not be extorted." He continued, "We are going to do what is required by the rule of law, and any threats that anyone makes are not going to affect the way we do our work. "

Rosenstein is at the heart of a major political controversy

Rosenstein has long been considered an apolitical shooter by those who worked with him. "He has a franchise on him – there is no bullshit," said Philip Heymann, the former Rosenstein professor at Harvard Law School and later his colleague before Trump let Rosenstein go. "He says what he thinks, but he's always right."

In 2005, President George W. Bush appointed Rosenstein attorney Maryland to the United States. President Barack Obama kept him in office, making Rosenstein one of only three American lawyers (out of a total of 93). Rosenstein officially joined the Trump administration last April as Deputy Attorney General after receiving broad bipartisan support in his confirmation vote.

But Rosenstein is in the midst of a major political controversy two weeks away from his new job. On May 9, 2017, he co-wrote a letter with Sessions arguing that Trump should fire the then FBI director, James Comey, because of the way Comey had handled the results of the FBI. Clinton agency investigation.

"Over the past year," wrote Rosenstein, "the reputation and credibility of the FBI have suffered substantial damage and have affected the entire Department of Justice."

He added, "I can not argue with the director's handling of Secretary Clinton's email investigation, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the near-universal judgment he has deceived.

Trump kicked Comey later in the day, citing the Sessions-Rosenstein letter as the reason. Pro-deceptive Republicans and conservative media applauded the decision to remove Comey, but Democrats were furious. And some of this rage has spread to Rosenstein.

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) told NPR shortly after the dismissal of Comey that he had "lost all self-confidence" in Rosenstein, whose "first official action was to give his name to this letter. false reasons [for] dismiss the FBI director.

Those who know Rosenstein say he recommended firing Comey not because he wanted to please Trump, but rather because he thought that Comey had damaged the FBI's reputation. "He is guided by justice and not by politics," said Steve Levin, a former colleague from Rosenstein, Maryland, in an interview before the dismissal.

A week later, Rosenstein appointed Mueller as a special advisor, authorizing him to consider possible links between Trump and Russia, as well as "any question arising from the investigation".

It seems clear that Rosenstein is not in Trump's pocket. But Trump himself wondered aloud where was Rosenstein's true loyalty, tweeting June 16, "An investigation is underway for firing the FBI director by the man who told me to dismiss the FBI director! Witch hunt."

The Trump-Russia probe could be in serious trouble

Rosenstein did not stop Mueller from pursuing the investigation as he saw fit, and he did everything possible to keep Mueller pursuing his investigation.

But if Rosenstein is fired or resigned, Francisco could change all that, especially if Trump applies significant pressure. That said, if Francisco fact Mueller fire, the investigation might not be completely undermined, as five Trump associates have pleaded guilty and that prosecutors will likely continue to follow the leads since the start of the investigation in June 2016.

And the future is still very vague. If Francisco does not bid on Trump, the president could simply fire him. This may be more detrimental to the Mueller probe.

Last December, Asha Rangappa, a lawyer at Yale's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, wrote in an article on the Just Security blog that a new Deputy Attorney General could effectively paralyze the Mueller investigation by rejecting Mueller's claims. or to pursue charges against other people, for example.

In fact, the possible eviction of Rosenstein has now placed the Mueller probe in its most precarious position to date – possibly allowing Trump to escape further investigation of him, his associates, and his family.