US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last year suggested to US Department of Justice colleagues that he secretly record conversations with US President Donald Trump in the White House, but at least one person who was present said he was joking.
The conversation was reported on Friday by the New York Times, which described secondhand accounts suggesting that Rosenstein was serious about the proposal.
The report said he also discussed identifying Cabinet members willing to invoke the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of a president who is unfit for office.
Photo: AFP
The person who was in the room said there was never an intention of actually recording a conversation with the president. The person asked not to be identified.
Rosenstein rejected the Times account of the comments, which it reported he made just weeks after becoming deputy attorney general and being caught up in the uproar over Trump’s dismissal of former FBI director James Comey.
“I never pursued or authorized recording the president and any suggestion that I have ever advocated for the removal of the president is absolutely false,” he said in a statement.
The report is explosive, because Rosenstein appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If Rosenstein is fired or quits, a successor could rein in or end the probe into Russian election interference that Trump has long denounced as a “witch hunt” initiated by anti-Trump forces in the FBI and the justice department.
US Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer warned Trump against seizing on the report as a reason to dismiss Rosenstein.
“This story must not be used as a pretext for the corrupt purpose of firing Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein in order install an official who will allow the president to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation,” Schumer said in a statement.
The White House declined immediate comment, but the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, tweeted: “Shocked!!! Absolutely Shocked!!! Ohhh, who are we kidding at this point? No one is shocked that these guys would do anything in their power to undermine @realDonaldTrump.”
US Representative Matt Gaetz said in a statement that the panel should hold a hearing on Rosenstein “in order to ascertain the truth.”
The Times said that some of the memos capturing Rosenstein’s comments had been written by Andrew McCabe, who was acting FBI director at the time and was later fired amid allegations that he “lacked candor” about authorizing the FBI to talk to the media about a criminal inquiry related to former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“Andrew McCabe drafted memos to memorialize significant discussions he had with high level officials and preserved them so he would have an accurate, contemporaneous record of those discussions,” McCabe’s lawyer Michael Bromwich said in a statement.
“When he was interviewed by the special counsel more than a year ago, he gave all of his memos — classified and unclassified — to the special counsel’s office. A set of those memos remained at the FBI at the time of his departure in late January 2018. He has no knowledge of how any member of the media obtained those memos,” Bromwich said.
Some conservative Republicans critical of Rosenstein were cautious in saying whether they would trust allegations in memos from McCabe, who has been an even more frequent target of their condemnation.
“Andy McCabe is under investigation for lying to the FBI. His words and memos should be viewed with extreme skepticism,” Representative Mark Meadows said on Twitter. “But if this story is true, it underscores a gravely troubling culture at FBI/DOJ and the need for FULL transparency. Declassify everything. Let Americans judge.”
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