Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President by Michael S. Schmidt

Author:Michael S. Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781984854667
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

“Sessions? I think he’s a good guy,” Rosenstein said, suggesting that he believed the attorney general would be on board. “I don’t know him that well, but he seems like a good guy so far. Kelly too,” he continued.

McCabe found it unlikely that Rosenstein had ever actually spoken to either Sessions or Kelly about such a move. But to McCabe it was clear that this wasn’t a joke, and that made McCabe uncomfortable. The FBI, he believed, should never be part of a conversation about ways to remove the president.

McCabe understood why Rosenstein thought he was going to get fired if he appointed a special counsel, but that was not his concern. This may be the biggest decision that either of them would be involved in in their careers, and they needed to get it right. McCabe was losing his patience with Rosenstein, and he believed that he was acting cowardly. He immediately thought back to the Saturday Night Massacre, when in 1973 the Justice Department’s top two officials famously resigned in protest of President Richard Nixon’s decision to fire the special prosecutor who was investigating him. Didn’t Rosenstein understand that it was better to stand up for what is right and sacrifice your career than sink to the level of Nixon?

No matter how convincing McCabe believed his arguments to be, he could see that he wasn’t getting through to Rosenstein. So he went for the next move he could make that he believed would put even more pressure on Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel. McCabe said he planned on going up to Capitol Hill the following day to brief the Gang of Eight about the investigations the bureau had opened and answer any questions the lawmakers had. In telling Rosenstein what he planned to do, McCabe believed he was pressing on an area where he had extensive experience but Rosenstein had little. McCabe had been a senior FBI official for several years, often going up to brief lawmakers on sensitive national security threats. Since graduating from Harvard Law School, Rosenstein had spent his entire career in the Justice Department. While that gave him extensive government experience, he had been the U.S. attorney in Baltimore, one of the mid-tier offices that was often passed over for the most serious, complex, and politically difficult cases. Rosenstein had told McCabe early in his tenure that he knew little about dealing with “the legislature,” talking as if Washington were some sort of glorified state capital and affirming to McCabe that he really didn’t know his way around.

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