Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein spiraled into rage and paranoia after President Trump ordered him to write the memo he cited as justification to fire FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, according to a new book.
In a private meeting at the Justice Department days after Comey was fired on May 12, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe writes in his upcoming memoir Rosenstein was “glassy-eyed” and said he was sleep deprived after he came to the conclusion that the White House had used him.
“He said it wasn’t his idea. The president had ordered him to write the memo justifying the firing,” McCabe writes. Rosenstein also said, “There’s no one here that I can trust.”
A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment to the Washington Examiner on McCabe’s claims about the deputy attorney general.
Less than a week later, Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigation looking into Russian election interference and possible collusion between with Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Mueller is reportedly investigating whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice by firing Comey.
Although Trump initially said Comey was fired per the suggestion of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein, he said shortly thereafter the “Russia thing” was a factor.
The account in McCabe’s book, first reported by the Guardian, echoes reporting by the New York Times that focused on the struggle Rosenstein went through in the days after Comey was fired. Although Rosenstein told Congress that same month he “stand[s] by” the controversial memo he wrote, he privately lamented how the ordeal tarnished his reputation. Rosenstein was “shaken,” “unsteady,” and “overwhelmed,” one person who spoke with Rosenstein told the outlet. Another source said he was “frantic, nervous, upset and emotionally dis-regulated.”
A Justice Department spokesperson offered a different explanation for why Rosenstein was upset, pinning the blame on McCabe for not informing him of memos Comey wrote outlining conversations he had with Trump.
“To be clear, he was upset not because knowledge of the existence of the memos would have changed the [Deputy Attorney General’s] decision regarding Mr. Comey, but that Mr. McCabe chose not to tell him about their existence until only hours before someone shared them with The New York Times,” DOJ’s Sarah Isgur Flores told the Times.
Rosenstein is now expected to depart the Justice Department, following the likely Senate confirmation of attorney general nominee William Barr next week. He has long been the subject of criticism of Trump-allied Republican lawmakers who have accused the Justice Department of being biased at the top levels due to document request disputes and reports in September that said he discussed wearing a “wire” to record conversations with Trump and that he was recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.
Rosenstein denied the reporting, while sources told NBC News that he was only joking about secretly recording the president.
McCabe, a 21-year veteran of the FBI, was fired March 16, 2018, two days before he planned to retire on his 50th birthday and collect a full pension, after the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General determined that he misled investigators about the role he had in leaking information to the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 about the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
He “lacked candor” on four occasions when interviewing with internal investigators, the IG report said.
In April, it was revealed that the Justice Department IG had referred its findings to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington for possible criminal charges. Federal prosecutors have since been using a grand jury to investigate McCabe.
McCabe’s book, titled “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” is highly critical of the president’s “bullying” tactics and will hit book shelves later this month.
