Another political tell-all

The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, privately complained that he was ordered by president Donald Trump to write the notorious memo justifying the firing of the FBI director James Comey, according to Comey’s former deputy.

Andrew McCabe writes in a new book that Rosenstein, who has publicly defended the memo, lamented that the president had directed him to rationalise Comey’s dismissal, which is now the subject of inquiries into whether Trump obstructed justice.

[...]

“He said it wasn’t his idea. The president had ordered him to write the memo justifying the firing,” McCabe writes. Rosenstein said he was having trouble sleeping, McCabe writes. “There’s no one here that I can trust,” he is quoted as saying.

  The Guardian

I know Rosenstein tried to make up for it by appointing a special counsel and holding the line afterward, but the fact is, if this is true, he put his job (personal gain) above his duty (lawful, honest upholding of the Constitution), and that's not really the kind of people we want in government, any more than we want the kind who go into it without any scruples or conscience at all.

McCabe’s book, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, is due on sale later this month. A copy was obtained by the Guardian prior to its release.

I'm sure it will sell well.

It provides the strongest indication so far that Rosenstein’s private view on the memo clashed with his testimony to Congress saying: “I wrote it. I believe it. I stand by it.”

So, if McCabe's telling is accurate, Rosenstein lied to Congress, too.

At the time, the White House flatly denied that Trump had directed Rosenstein to write a justification for firing Comey. “It was all him,” Sean Spicer, the then press secretary, said of Rosenstein.

Widely discounted by everyone who knew how Trump operates.

Five days after his emotional remarks, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller, the special counsel, to take over the inquiry into whether Trump’s team coordinated with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

[...]

McCabe, a 22-year FBI veteran, who was fired after internal investigators said he had been dishonest, is scathing about a president he views as posing a threat to the country. He accuses Trump of undermining the FBI out of fear and diminishing the rule of law.

In his sharpest criticism, McCabe writes that after firing Comey, Trump and the White House counsel, Don McGahn, acted like mobsters by in effect offering McCabe protection in return for loyalty.

“The president and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate,” McCabe writes, recalling an Oval Office meeting soon after his elevation to acting FBI director.

He confirms reports that Trump asked him how he voted in 2016. Having been a lifelong registered Republican, McCabe writes, he did not cast a vote for president that year. McCabe was later publicly attacked by Trump, who abused him and his wife in tweets.

So...did McCabe tell Trump how he voted? I don't want to read the book.

[McCabe] is also sharply critical of Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, saying he had trouble focusing, frequently flew into red-faced rages and confused classified intelligence with things he had read in the media.

Mini Trump.

He accuses Trump of using the tactics and rhetoric of totalitarian dictators in persuading loyal “shock troops” that anyone who disagrees with them is a traitor.

Trump’s “heedless bullying” and refusal to tolerate any view other than his own is “nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue” that is then further amplified by online media, McCabe writes.

The book does not reveal new findings from the Trump-Russia investigation.

So, essentially, McCabe is just venting, like the rest of us. Only he's making money doing it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.