Dear people observing C-SPAN on Wednesday morning: Yes, that is Rod Rosenstein; Yes, this is 2020; No, this is not the way the U.S. Senate should be wasting its time as a pandemic ravages the nation, a third of Americans are unemployed, and Donald Trump squeezes into his tin-pot dictator onesie. The idea that Republicans could actually make “Obamagate” happen at this point is about as realistic as the notion that Mitch McConnell will ever find anything urgent enough to interfere with installing new conservative judges. Still, former Trump punching bag and also former Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein was dragged back into Senate chambers to play his part in a “scandal” that 99% of America now places right up there with the incident of the fancy mustard.
What has a morning of intense Lindsey Grahaming brought forth? Rather than throwing the whole Russia investigation on the rocks, Rosenstein has repeatedly defended his appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, Mueller’s integrity, and the findings of the Mueller investigation. About the only point where Republicans have gotten Rosenstein to say something that goes on the Fox News checklist has been Rosenstein’s claim that the FBI was responsible for issues with the FISA warrents for Carter Page.
And there’s only one problem with that ...
Efforts on the part of several Republican senators to get Rosenstein to drive a bus over Mueller were repeatedly less than successful. "I decided that appointing a special counsel was the best way to complete the investigation appropriately and promote public confidence in its conclusions," said Rosenstein. Rosenstein also indicated that there were reasons “to be suspicious” of connections between the Trump campaign and Russian officials in 2017 when Mueller was appointed. However, Rosenstein slipped back to the Trumpian side of the line in expressing his interpretation of Mueller’s findings by saying that, “the eventual conclusions were that Russians committed crimes seeking to influence the election and Americans did not conspire with them."
The actual conclusion was that there was insufficient evidence to charge a conspiracy against members of the Trump campaign. That didn’t erase the more than 100 points of contact that the investigation showed between the campaign and Russian officials.
While Rosenstein might not have fulfilled Republican dreams on the Mueller front, he was ready and willing to blame former FBI director James Comey and assistant director Andrew McCabe for “significant errors” with the FISA warrants that were used to secure an investigation into Carter Page. Under questions, Rosenstein repeatedly made statements about what he had “heard” or “been told” about these warrants. And the issue there is that … Rosenstein signed at least one of these warrants. Apparently without reading it or asking any questions about why he was applying his signature.
Though the morning seems to have been spent using hammer and tongs to extract some statements that can be used in the next Judicial Watch fundraiser, there are a number of more interesting items that don’t seem to have come up.
- What were the “disagreements” Barr mentioned he had with Rosenstein over whether or not Trump had obstructed justice?
- Why did Rosenstein offer to wear a wire and record Trump?
- What did Rosenstein talk to cabinet members about invoking the 25th Amendment?
There have been interesting moments—like Ted Cruz attacking the idea of battling Russian interference by wallowing in Russian propaganda and offering up this moment of absolutely unvarnished when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife interrogation. “There are only two explanations for how you handled the anti-Trump Mueller investigation,” said Cruz. “Either you were complicit in a coup attempt against the president, or you were grossly negligent. Which one was it?" Cruz’s unanswerable battering also extracted from Rosenstein a declaration that he would not have signed that FISA warrant knowing what he knows today … but only when it was presented to Rosenstein as knowingly committing fraud.
But really, at this point of the hearings there is only one piece of “evidence” that has made onlookers gasp in horror and home viewers go for the “close” button on YouTube.
It seems clear that Rosenstein came prepared to deliver for Donald Trump the nonspecific claims against Comey and McCabe that are necessary to sustain the investigate the investigators theater. It also seems obvious that Rosenstein came with a phonebook sized stack of CYA in which he’s willing to point in every direction, so long as none of the fingers are turned back toward himself.
And it seems blisteringly obvious that this is not what America wants to see on June 3, 2020.