The New York Times dropped a Friday afternoon bombshell with an article by Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt that accuses Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein of having suggested in the Spring of 2017 that he or other Justice Department officials surreptitiously record the president of the United States to provide evidence of his lack of fitness for office, and to beginning 25th amendment proceedings to remove him from office for the same reason.
Rosenstein issued a statement denying the charges, but the reporters seem to have enough evidence that it happened to run with the story with confidence that they’ve got it right. Among that evidence are reportedly some memos created by Andrew McCabe that memorialized the conversations.
This is obviously a big story, and it could give Trump the justification he’s been seeking to fire Rosenstein and convince the Senate to confirm a replacement.
The first thing I did after reading the article was revisit my archives to refresh my memory about the time period in question. I’ve put together a little timeline that includes the first four stories I wrote that mentioned Rosenstein and some of the key events that were occurring in the Russia investigation at the time:
February 14, 2017: Speaking one-on-one in the Oval Office, Trump brings up Michael Flynn to FBI Director James Comey. “I hope you can let this go,” Trump says of the Flynn case, according to Comey.
March 2, 2017: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who served as a top national security adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign, recuses himself from any campaign-related investigations.
March 3, 2017: In testimony to Congress, FBI Director James Comey says: “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election.”
March 10, 2017: Trump fires 46 U.S. Attorneys, including Preet Bharara.
March 19, 2017: Diane Feinstein’s Faith in America -The first mention of Rod Rosenstein in my archives. He comes up because Sen. Chuck Grassley is furiously refusing to move on the nomination of deputy attorney general until he gets answers about whether Trump associates are being investigated for possible collusion with the Russians.
March 20, 2017: The House Intelligence Committee holds its first public hearing. Comey admits that there is an ongoing FBI investigation into whether there were any links between individuals associated with the Russian government and the Trump campaign and whether they coordinated.
April 26, 2017: Rod Rosenstein is sworn in as deputy attorney general, giving him oversight of the Russia probe in the wake of Sessions’ recusal.
May 8, 2017: Rosenstein agrees to write a new memo supporting Comey’s dismissal, using Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation as the main rationale.
May 9, 2017: Comey is fired as FBI director.
May 10, 2017: Will Rod Rosenstein Keep His Promises? -Wherein I note that several Democratic senators voted against Rosenstein’s confirmation because he refused to make a firm commitment to the appointment of a special counsel, and that those Democrats who did vote to confirm him did so on the basis that he committed to appoint one if he deemed it necessary.
May 11, 2017: NYTs Editorial Board Flubs Letter to Rosenstein -Wherein I am critical of the editorial board for making the Russia investigation into too much of a partisan exercise, but also express skepticism that Rosenstein can impartially lead the investigation and insist that he appoint a special counsel.
May 17, 2017: Rosenstein appoints Robert Mueller as special counsel.
May 18, 2017: Man of Extraordinary Integrity Launches Witch Hunt– Wherein I laugh at the administration for extolling Rosenstein’s virtues to the rafters until the precise moment that he authorizes a special counsel.
I’ll have a lot more to say about Rosenstein’s alleged behavior in this time period, but it’s important to put this all in context. The president was clearly trying to obstruct the investigation of the election. He fired Comey for this reason, and initially said (falsely) that Rosenstein’s endorsement and memo were the reasons why Comey was terminated.
According to the article, Rosenstein was also sitting in on interviews Trump was conducting in his search for a replacement FBI director, and he didn’t feel like the president was taking the process seriously or conducting himself with the bare minimum of competence necessary in the chief executive. For this, and other reasons, the prospect of removing him from office seemed like a rational response.
Supposedly, Rosenstein was acting erratically in this time period and was “not himself,” but nothing he is alleged to have done seems unjustifiable in retrospect.
On the other hand, if you shoot for the king, you best not miss. If he really was serious when he advocated wearing a wire into meetings with the president and advocating that others do the same, and if he really did try to muster a 25th amendment challenge to the presidency of Donald Trump, then he is going to lose his job.
What protected Rosenstein before was the Senate’s protectiveness of the investigation, which is also why Jeff Sessions has not been fired. But Senate Republicans were already coming around to the idea that they can’t force an attorney general on the president in perpetuity and they’d have to agree to confirm a replacement for Sessions next year. They are not going to insist that Trump continue to employ a deputy attorney general who actively plotted to secretly record him and lead an effort to remove him from office.
I have no idea why these allegations did not emerge before now and I don’t have a ton of confidence that the reporting is completely accurate in how it characterizes Rosenstein’s actions and motivations. But the story is out there now and it’s going to have big repercussions.
. . . about this elsewhere (LGM, Emptywheel, atrios, including stuff linked/quoted in comments).
From those, the impression is quite the opposite of “serious allegations”. (Or maybe “serious” in the sense of potential repercussions, even if invalid; but not “serious” in the sense of “deserve to be taken seriously”?)
I.e., sourcing looks very dubious and tenuous (e.g., third-hand, sources “briefed” on the contents of the McCabe memos but who hadn’t seen them; the most authoritative source — i.e., fewest degrees-of-separation-from-firsthand iirc — specifying that Rosenstein said it . . . sarcastically!, though this lede was apparently buried far down in the article (which — full disclosure — I haven’t read myself: paywall). In this take, NYT’s framing, including in headline, that “Rosenstein suggested” wearing a wire and invoking the 25th Amendment — ignoring that this was reportedly said sarcastically — is extremely misleading to the point of deception, and thus not remotely a “serious allegation”.
I don’t know whose take is more valid. But boy is there a chasm gaping between yours and some other folks I generally find smart, perceptive, insightful, and Reality-Based.
This (i.e., “sarcastically”) seems a rather non-trivial datum to be absent from your piece, booman.
NYT Gives Trump His Excuse to Fire Rod Rosenstein
Marcy has hit the nail on the head. Let the hysteria on Fox begin. Trump will watch, and “catapult the propaganda”.
Marcy (who I’ve only seen on Twitter so far, because I’ve been slogging through writing my own boring piece) was pointing out the importance of looking away from the TImes coverage to other places, including a really much more satisfying story at Washington Post, which gives more attention to the really interesting thing, that McCabe wrote a collection of Comey-like memos after Comey’s firing and Mueller has them.
The Times may have gotten the scoop, but I don’t think they’ve understood the story very well. They’ve been snookered by whoever is leaking the material, and I think it’s somebody trying to convince Trump that he ought to fire Rosenstein, though he really doesn’t want to.
Luckily it’s not like a sarcastic remark ever cost an FBI employee his job.
Even Hannity is saying these allegations are garbage. This is Alex Jones-type stuff.
I agree that the supposed motivations of Rosenstein for invoking the 25th do not really make sense. After all, Trump has done far worse since then, so if this was really so developed in his mind that he proposed it out loud then there should be additional and more recent evidence.
I smell a rat, and the Times had been god awful in the Trump era for not being suckered into these kind of gossip pieces so it all relies on if Trump decides to have actual follow through on this.
over to twitter and checkout David Simon’s brutal takedown of the story AND Maggie Haberman (who slowly seems to realize she’s punching up in class).
link
Seems fishy to me.
The New York Times doesn’t exactly have a sterling record with regard to these kinds of things.
It’s long been clear that Michael Schmidt (cf. Haberman) is a stenographer who plants stories in the NYT for WH flacks. For that he gets Access.
The latter have been throwing whatever they can against the wall and hoping something sticks; this bullshit is just more of the same. Given the timing, I imagine it’s also an attempt to distract from the Republiclowns’ clusterfµ¢k of a nomination to the Supreme Court.
I wish people would stop hating on Haberman so much. It’s dirty work she does, but somebody needs to do it, in this imperial White House where personality and intrigue mean so much and policy means so little, and she does it really well.
Schmidt, who broke the story of Hillary Clinton’s email server without asking what his sources were aiming at, is another matter. He’s handling this one pretty badly too.
There’s doing Palace Intrique pieces, and there’s not understanding your own stories. So then this leads people to think “corrupt for access or just stupid?” They’re not dumb, but also raised at Politico — and she’s been covering Trump for so long on this beat that it’s bordering on corrupt behavior.
. . . dumped on twitter (e.g., initially promoting the doppelganger idiocy, then belatedly coming at least partially to her senses and deleting those), more than her actual published articles, that earns her a lot of derision. I don’t necessarily find it misplaced.
Seems like somebody who needs at least as stringent an editor of her tweeting as for her “reporting”. Seems also prone to letting herself get used to bad ends, sometimes without seeming to realize that’s what’s going on.
The tweets are so defensive they really make her look guilty, don’t they? Times really does let itself get used, I’m not denying that.
Maybe my objection is to the way we zero in on the woman instead of Schmidt or Peter Baker or Jeremy Peters as our symbol of it.
Jeremy Peters gets used in other ways, but he strikes me as actually being stupid rather than knowingly being used — Maggie at least understands who Trump is and what he’s about. Peters’ beat is covering “insurgent” Republicans and he doesn’t even know how Ron Paul libertarianism is connected to Trumpism. Which goes without saying I think he should be fired because he’s bad at his job. He’s also corrupt because of a book he’s writing (wrote?), and perhaps he’s pretending to not understand these things pays the bills.
Schmidt got pilloried for his “interview”.
They’re all bad. Yet they set the standards. WaPo and WSJ are eating their lunch imo.
. . . should probably just stay off twitter altogether.
Her reflexive rush to come to the defense of colleagues being validly criticized, i.e., defending the indefensible, does great harm to her credibility (and deservedly so, imo).
Don’t know why you’re taking this so literally when if you read other reports they seem to differ with the Times lede. To me this just looks like a Rudy Giuliani/Bill Shine ratfucking.
This is absolutely the worst book Robert Ludlum ever wrote. Everything, the characters, the plot, the dialogue, is just off.
Simply, it’s not his best work.
.
Trump will absolutely fire Rosenstein, without the slightest regard for whether any of this is true or not, or whether the NYT got the story right or not. He wants Rosenstein out, and this is his chance.
BUT, Trump absolutely cannot possibly fire Rosenstein right before a National Election in which the Republicans are under serious fire and threatened with losing their majorities in Congress, with the result that Trump will absolutely be impeached. Without any doubt, and he knows it, since he’s campaigning around the country telling his base just that.
If he fires Rosenstein BEFORE the election the fire-storm of criticism in the media will utterly dwarf anything in living memory, including the Watergate. He will be utterly pilloried on every news channel but Fox News.
And the GOP will absolutely lose the Senate. This is just absolutely the last straw.
SOME PROOF: Just saw a local TV interview for Denver TV about Colorado House District 6 (Mike Coffman (R)) where they were interviewing two “Independents” – who were really former Republicans in his district and the woman says “I am so disappointed in Trump that I’m voting the straight Democratic ticket.” And her husband who is a former conservative Republican, but who doesn’t like Trump, says the same thing.
And they don’t show up in surveys, because they self-identify as “Independents” now. But, they WERE Republicans who voted for Mike Coffman, but now they aren’t. So, when you see political surveys showing Trump with 90% of his base, that looks like all Republicans are lock step with Dear Leader.
But, they aren’t. A LOT of them now self-identify as “Independents” like those folks in CO-06. Proto-typical suburban swing district. The GOP is hemorrhaging exactly these voters all over the country.
Trump firing Bernstein on some “trumped-up” charge, and then shit-canning the Special Prosecutor in a parody of the Saturday Night Massacre? That would be the final nail in Trump’s coffin in a LOT of districts like CO-6 all over the Country.
It would hand the Democrats the Senate and certain impeachment. And you can bet Trump’s advisors are telling him exactly that.
BUT, AFTER the election? Trump spends every single night now, praying for victory in the elections so he can move against ALL of his enemies, just like Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather.
So, if he wins, it’s “Il Duce” for life Jack. He can dismantle our Democracy and say that the American people authorized his take over. A plebicite on whether we wanted to be a Democracy or not. And, he can plausibly argue, we chose not, by electing a Republican majority, knowing exactly what we know know about this utterly and irremediably criminal regime.
Ah, but if he loses, then firing Rosenstein would instantly result in impeachment charges being brought in the House. He might think they’ll do it anyway, but this would make a perfect excuse for a bunch of obstruction of justice charges.
And of course the House Democrats will hold massively televised committee hearings exactly like the Watergate Hearings, and House Clinton Impeachment hearings.
And Trump’s support will be at about the rock bottom possible 33%. His hard-core fascist, racist base that will stick with him regardless.
But, those angry white racists simply aren’t enough to win elections anywhere outside the deep South. They will be utterly crushed in 2020 if they stick with Trump. In 2020 the GOP is defending 20 seats to Dems’ 10, including Corey Gardner (R-Colo); Thom Tillis (R-NC); Susan Collins (R-ME) who is probably already toast due to her vote for Kavanaugh; and Iowa’s Joni Ernst.
They can’t afford to stick with Trump unless the GOP is going to install fascism in America for real. And without the House, there’s no way they can do it without being totally blocked.
So, the entire fate of our Democracy depends utterly and completely upon the election. We all knew that long ago, but now it’s become starkly real and immediate. This is it guys. Well, we “better start swimming or we’ll sink like a stone”!
. . . after not having played it for years, I recently took that song out, dusted it off, and re-inserted it in my personal repertoire for its renewed resonance with current circumstances (along with …Hard Rain).
Also interestingly (to me), I’ve realized that it now feels like I’m singing it at myself (and my cohort) instead of at “them”:
I’ve thought about that quote many times since the ’60s. I thought that was what was happening when Obama was elected, yet, just like in ’68, suddenly it was all undone. All the progress we thought we’d made during the Civil Rights Era and the Anti-War Movement, and yet things were suddenly worse than ever.
I never thought to relive those days, but . . . . here we are “in this Foul Year of Our Lord 2018!” — Hunter S. Thompson.
You should go back and re-read The Great Shark Hunt for all the collected reporting Hunter S. Thompson did on the Nixon impeachment.
And then ask yourself: “Who was Deep Throat really?”
A: FBI Deputy Director, Mark Felt.
Q: Why did Felt leak to the Washington Post every dirty secret Nixon had about Watergate?
A: Well, after J.Edgar Hoover died, Nixon sidelined Felt and all the other Hoover loyalists, and put in L. Patrick Gray as FBI Director. Felt was eased out of office, so Nixon could get “his man” in control of the FBI.
Q: What did Trump do when he took office?
A: He fired their Director James Comey, and then threw the career service officers of the FBI under the bus. He’s been vilifying them ever since and teaching all the Trumpists to hate them.
Q: Do they have to take that kind of crap lying down?
A: No, they do not. Hence, under Mueller they are bringing all the evidence used in going after all his henchmen, full time. Unless Trump is able to shut down the investigation, the FBI is going to destroy him.
And he’s going to utterly deserve it of course. Just like Nixon. They both fucked with the wrong people within Washington!
Trump will not fire Rosenstein. Why? Sean Hannity is a begging him not to do it. I’m not kidding. Tonight on Hannity, live on the air, Sean Hannity was going off on how Trump under any circumstances must not fire Rosenstein. I’m not kidding. This actually happened.
But I think this actually kind of makes sense. If you fire Rosenstein the next person in the line of succession was a trump supporter but he also has a serious career and is very good friends with Rosenstein. I can’t remember his name. But I don’t think he would be a puppet and just do Trump’s bidding.
And if you fired Rosenstein it makes it that much more difficult to fire the person you really want to get rid of which is Jeff sessions.
Hatchet job by the freedom caucus.
The reporters knew the leaker’s agenda. They were supposed to position the leaked info in a broader, more objective context. They didn’t.
I think they should be fired and the NYT should walk back the story. This is as bad as inciting the Iraq war. I’ll never click again or pay again if the NYT doesn’t do something to fix this mess. I can’t believe they were so careless with a massive bombshell.
Parts of that article make Rosenstien sound like a nitwit. He’s not a nitwit. He does have enemies. The freedom caucus already tried to impeach him.
I hate Hannity, but I’m relieved he’s protecting Rosenstien.
Worst thing about Trump is he inspires fanaticism. Look at what that idiot Whelan did: fanaticism overrode common sense. I feel fanatical, though hopefully I won’t be acting like a fool. I expect we’ll see a lot of fanatical acts in the next few weeks, including a surprise or two from the Fanatic in Chief. It’ll get ugly.
<blockquoute>On the other hand, if you shoot for the king, you best not miss.
But, unless he actually wore a wire to record Trump’s conversations, he didn’t “shoot at the king”.
If you believe the reports coming out of the White House, including Woodward’s book, the Anonymous Op-ed, and the torrent of leaks that have plagued Trump since day one, then “beginning 25th amendment proceedings” was a regular topic of discussion, whether in seriousness or in jest.