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

Author:Michael S. Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

★ ★ ★

MAY 21, 2017

ONE YEAR, TEN MONTHS, AND TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT

DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE—The weekend after his appointment, Mueller sought to fully understand his directives, and began to put together a team of prosecutors. That Sunday, he met with Rosenstein and McCabe to discuss the investigation.

Like brawlers who could not stop going after each other, McCabe and Rosenstein began arguing in front of Mueller. McCabe told Rosenstein that he needed to recuse himself from the investigation, due to his role in firing Comey.

Rosenstein shot back, saying that McCabe was the one who needed to recuse himself, because his wife had accepted money from a Clinton ally for her political campaign, Trump had repeatedly attacked him, and now he was out to avenge Comey’s firing.

McCabe, angered by Rosenstein’s comments, got up and left the meeting.

Once Rosenstein and Mueller were alone, the special counsel tried to find a middle ground by saying he would still bring FBI agents onto his team but that they would report directly to him, not McCabe.

“You don’t need to do anything more; no recusal will be needed,” Mueller said, about McCabe. “I will make clear with the agents that they report up through me and not through their chain of command.”

The matter of Rosenstein himself was a bit more complicated. Mueller told the deputy attorney general that his team would need to interview him to evaluate whether or not Rosenstein was likely to be a key witness against the president. Following that interview, Rosenstein—who had the ultimate authority to decide if he remained in charge of the investigation—could then make a call on his own recusal.

Two days later, investigators interviewed Rosenstein at the Justice Department, and the silence from Mueller’s team that followed told him that there would be no need to recuse himself from his role in overseeing the investigation. Legal experts on television raised questions about Rosenstein’s conflict, and Democrats pushed only lightly on the issue, as they now saw Rosenstein—because of his appointment of Mueller—as a potential ally.

In reporting for this book, I learned that Rosenstein’s primary reason for remaining in charge of the investigation was his contention that no one had ever told him that the firing of Comey was designed to interfere with the Russia investigation, nor did he believe that Comey’s dismissal ultimately had any impact on the investigation.

Secondarily, Rosenstein ascribed a sense of duty to his decision.

“It would be cowardly to recuse without any need,” Rosenstein would later say. “Everybody could find a reason so they did not have to deal with it.”

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