Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is finally opening up about his discussion with a top FBI official concerning the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s potential ties to Russia.
In his first TV interview since leaving the Trump administration in May 2019, Rosenstein told FOX 5 that there was talk of recording the 45th president for the inquiry but denied that he ever intended to wear a “wire” during the turbulent days that followed Trump firing FBI Director James Comey in 2017 before the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.
“I had a conversation with Andrew McCabe about an investigation that he was conducting involving the president. And there was a discussion about whether or not the president would be recorded in the course of that investigation. I never intended to wear a wire, and I think that if Mr. McCabe asked me to wear a wire, we would’ve had to reconsider the whole thing. Because you can’t run an investigation and serve as a witness,” Rosenstein said in an episode of the Siege on Democracy podcast published last month.
McCabe, Comey’s deputy who became acting FBI director for a couple months after the firing, made headlines in February 2019, when he corroborated reporting that claimed Rosenstein offered to wear a recording device while talking to other officials to tape Trump secretly.
That report, published by the New York Times in September 2018, also asserted that Rosenstein discussed Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president for being unfit. Rosenstein was asked during the interview whether he did indeed think Trump was unfit for office.
“Well, it depends on what you mean by the word ‘fit,'” Rosenstein said. “There was a lot of talk about whether the president should have been removed under the 25th Amendment. I don’t believe that. I mean, I think the president was capable of doing the job. Doesn’t mean I agree with the way he did it.”
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Rosenstein previously rejected the report, which also had sources who said he suggested FBI officials interviewing for the director job could also covertly record Trump, but only in a broad denial.
“The New York Times’s story is inaccurate and factually incorrect,” he said at the time it was published. “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.”
Rosenstein also disputed the report in testimony before Congress.
“I did not suggest or hint at secretly recording Mr. Trump,” Rosenstein told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I have never in any way suggested the president should be removed from office under the 25th Amendment,” he added.
Multiple reports had a source who said Rosenstein was merely being sarcastic in making the remark about secretly recording the president, but McCabe insisted that Rosenstein was “absolutely serious.”
“In fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had. I never actually considered taking him up on the offer. I did discuss it with my general counsel and my leadership team back at the FBI after he brought it up the first time,” McCabe added.
In response to McCabe’s 60 Minutes interview on CBS, the Justice Department issued a gruff rebuttal.
“As to the specific portions of this interview provided to the Department of Justice by ’60 Minutes’ in advance, the Deputy Attorney General again rejects Mr. McCabe’s recitation of events as inaccurate and factually incorrect,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement. “The Deputy Attorney General never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references. As the Deputy Attorney General previously has stated, based on his personal dealings with the President, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.”
In the spring of 2019, Mueller’s investigation culminated in a report that did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Kremlin but laid out 10 possible instances of obstruction of justice. Then-Attorney General William Barr and Rosenstein concluded obstruction had not occurred. McCabe said in 2019 he was the one who ordered an obstruction of justice inquiry into Trump after the firing of Comey to ensure the investigation would not “vanish in the night without a trace.” He also told FBI investigators that Rosenstein sought Comey’s advice on appointing a special counsel after playing a role in his firing.
The Russia investigation, which Trump derided as a “witch hunt,” is now under review by special counsel John Durham.
McCabe, who is now a CNN contributor, was fired from the FBI in early 2018 and sued the Justice Department for wrongful termination, seeking to regain his job and back pay and claiming that Trump was behind a scheme to force him out right before he was set to retire. A federal judge ruled in September that McCabe’s lawsuit should be allowed to move toward discovery, rejecting the Trump administration’s efforts to dismiss the case.
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The Justice Department declined to pursue criminal charges against McCabe last year after Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in 2018 detailing multiple instances in which McCabe “lacked candor” with Comey, FBI investigators, and inspector general investigators about his authorization to leak sensitive information to the Wall Street Journal that revealed the existence of an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
As for how Rosenstein now views the reporting on his private conversations about the Russia investigation, he warned that “the people who leak to the media always have an agenda.”
“For me, one of the fundamental principles that I wanted to follow in the department was not to talk about ongoing investigations, not to disparage people who were not charged by the Department of Justice, and that’s a rule that I followed religiously throughout tenure as the deputy AG and tried to serve as a role model in that respect for the rest of the department — that we just don’t talk about our cases,” Rosenstein said.
