Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reportedly considered appointing an ex-Justice Department official who worked as a lawyer for Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal to be the special counsel in charge of the Russia investigation.
The New York Times published a bombshell report Friday focused largely on talk of secretly recording Trump and invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to oust the president. In a statement, Rosenstein dismissed the story as being “inaccurate and factually incorrect.”
Buried deep within the report, centered on the fallout in the days after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, three sources said Rosenstein thought about appointing James Cole to the role later given to Robert Mueller, himself a former FBI director.
Cole served as a deputy attorney general from late 2010 to early 2015 — during the Obama years — and was Rosenstein’s supervisor at the DOJ in the early 1990s while he was prosecuting public corruption cases.
Cole also represented Blumenthal during the Benghazi investigations that looked into the 2012 attack at a U.S. complex in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the deaths of four Americans. A former employee of the Clinton Foundation, Blumenthal shares a controversial history with Hillary Clinton, whom he informally advised on Libya while she was secretary of state.
Blumenthal’s name has come up multiple times in the past year by GOP investigators.
In February, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who had chaired the Select Committee on Benghazi, appeared to suggest to Fox News that Blumenthal was connected to the controversial “Trump dossier,” allegedly feeding details to a State Department employee during the last months of the Obama administration.
Blumenthal was also included in a July reference list of people connected to the Russia investigation which House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., sent to the Oversight and Judiciary Committees for testimony in an “open setting.”
Many of the individuals on that list were tied to Hillary Clinton and the dossier, which contains compromising yet unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia. Compiled in 2016, the research effort was conducted by ex-British spy Christopher Steele and was funded in part by Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
