The New York Times reports that Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (shown) suggested recording the president’s conversations, then staging a bloodless coup d’etat by convincing cabinet members to invoke 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
Rosenstein’s friends, NBC reports, said the controversial man, whom Republicans want to impeach for a purported conflict of interest in the probe of Russian/Trump campaign collusion in the 2016 election, was just “joking.”
Rosenstein says The New York story is wrong. The story is, as The Donald would say, fake news.
The Story
On Friday, the Times delivered a detailed report built upon the claims of anonymous sources. Rosenstein, they told the Times, was out to get the president.
“The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit,” the Times reported.
The Times continued:
Mr. Rosenstein made these suggestions in the spring of 2017 when Mr. Trump’s firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director plunged the White House into turmoil. Over the ensuing days, the president divulged classified intelligence to Russians in the Oval Office, and revelations emerged that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey to pledge loyalty and end an investigation into a senior aide.
Mr. Rosenstein was just two weeks into his job. He had begun overseeing the Russia investigation and played a key role in the president’s dismissal of Mr. Comey by writing a memo critical of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But Mr. Rosenstein was caught off guard when Mr. Trump cited the memo in the firing, and he began telling people that he feared he had been used.
Rosenstein suggested the coup in “meetings and conversations with other Justice Department and F.B.I. officials.” and apparently told acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, whom Trump also fired, that he might persuade “Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John F. Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security and now the White House chief of staff, to mount an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
Unsurprisingly, Rosenstein said the Times account is nonsense: “The New York Times’s story is inaccurate and factually incorrect. I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda. But let me be clear about this: Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
A Joke
Deep Staters scrambled, presumably to protect their man. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said Rosenstein was speaking sarcastically, and NBC reported likewise.
During a meeting at a secure room at the Justice Department, the leftist network reported:
Rosenstein was arguing with Andrew McCabe, then the acting director of the FBI, about the president, according to a senior Justice Department official.
“Well, what do you want me to do, Andy, wear a wire?” Rosenstein asked at the meeting, which also included FBI lawyer Lisa Page and four career DOJ officials, according to the senior official. One of the career civil servants was Scott Schools, who would later go on to sign off on the firing of McCabe, the official said.
This official and a source who was in the room characterized Rosenstein’s remark as sarcastic.
GOP, Democrats Mad At Rosenstein
Rosenstein has invited the ire of Democrats and Republicans alike. Democrats are furious, as the Times reported, because he penned the memorandum that Trump used to explain firing then-FBI Director James Comey, who bungled the probe into Hillary Clinton’s breach of national security. Republicans filed impeachment articles against Rosenstein because he did not recuse himself from the probe of Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, even though he had signed an application to conduct electronic surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser.
Question: Is Rosenstein an honest government official, who, while disliking Trump, did not suggest the coup? That might suggest a Deep State hit job, using its premier propaganda sheet, to provoke Trump into firing him.
Esquire suggested that someone “played [the Times] like a $5 fiddle” because the newspaper provided Trump with the excuse to fire Rosenstein. If true, that suggests Trump partisans planted the story, which Esquire noted, contains a direct quote from just one person: Rosenstein.
Or did Rosenstein actually suggest a 25th Amendment overthrow?
Photo of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein: AP Images
