Rod Rosenstein: Trump Rump

Trump’s idea of correcting the record was to say publicly exactly the thing about a law enforcement officer that makes his continued service in office impossible: That Trump had used his deputy attorney general as window dressing on a pre-cooked political decision to shut down an investigation involving himself, a decision for which he needed the patina of a high-minded rationale.

Once the President has said this about you—a law enforcement officer who works for him and who promised the Senate in confirmation hearings you would show independence—you have nothing left. These are the costs of working for Trump, and it took Rosenstein only two weeks to pay them.

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Comey’s firing has shaken me very deeply, and no aspect of it has shaken me more than the apparent corruption of Rosenstein, on whom I was counting to be a support base for the career men and women of the Justice Department in their efforts to continue honorable service in difficult times.

  Benjamin Wittes @ Lawfare Blog

Really? The AG is Jeff Sessions, ferfuxsake. Why would they then go for a decent human being to fill the deputy AG spot?

I have known Rosenstein for a long time. I have always thought well of him. I've admired his ability to serve at senior levels in administrations of both parties and impress both sides with apolitical service. I considered it a positive sign that Trump had installed a career professional as deputy attorney general under Jeff Sessions, who is a polarizing figure to many. And I quietly told many people anxious about Sessions that I was not worried that anything too terrible would happen at the department with Rosenstein and Rachel Brand—who has not yet been confirmed as associate attorney general and of whom I think extremely highly—in the deputy's and associate's offices respectively.

I was profoundly wrong about Rosenstein.

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[Rosenstein's] memo is a press release to justify an unsavory use of presidential power. It is also a profoundly unfair document. And it's gutless too. Because at the end of the day, the memo greases the wheels for Comey's removal without ever explicitly urging it—thus allowing its author to claim that he did something less than recommend the firing, while in fact providing the fig leaf for it.

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Rosenstein’s memo wasn’t honorable, and it debases the office of the deputy attorney general for the occupant of that office to issue such a memo.

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Trump, after all, had already made his decision, and Rosenstein clearly knew that. He met with the President on Monday, after all, along with Sessions. What happened at that meeting? “The president asked that they put their concerns and recommendations in writing, which is the letter that you all had received,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders a little too candidly, the Washington Post reports. So Rosenstein was simply memorializing his concerns about Comey’s handling of months-old matters in a document he knew would be used for political ends.

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The memo was also cowardly. Rosenstein doesn't even take responsibility for the recommendation he was plainly making.

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Nor is it quite true that Rosenstein did not recommend Comey’s firing, except in the very limited sense that he did not write the words, “I recommend that you fire Jim Comey.”

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If he did not want Comey to be fired, he should have written a memo explaining how Comey had erred and why those errors did not in his view amount to a firing offense. Conversely, if he believed that Comey needed to go, he should have had the courage to make that view explicit.

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Rosenstein has been around the block in this town too many time not to know exactly what he was doing when he wrote this.

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Stopping just short of explicitness in order to retain some marginally plausible deniability was not an honorable course. It was an excercise in Washington CYA, and it compounds the indecency of the episode.

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It took Donald Trump only two weeks to put Rosenstein, a figure of sterling reputation, in the position of choosing between continued service and behaving honorably—and it took only two days after that for the President to announce that Rosenstein’s memo, after all, was nothing more than a Potemkin village designed as a facade on Trump’s predecided outcome.

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The lesson here is that these are not honorable people, and they will do their best to drag you down to their level. They will often succeed.