Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein considered sneaking out of the White House a copy of a draft letter in which President Trump declared he wanted to fire FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation, according to a report by the New York Review of Books.

Trump also wrote in the four-page letter that he was unhappy with Comey’s refusal to say publicly that Trump was not personally under investigation.

The president’s letter was never used, and Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions ended up drafting another memo to justify the firing of Comey. Their primary rationale was Comey’s mishandling of the Hillary Clinton investigation.

The report said Rosenstein spiraled into rage and paranoia following Trump’s firing of Comey on May 9, 2017. Rosenstein felt he was being used by the White House, even though Trump acknowledged publicly that the Russia probe was a factor in his decision to fire Comey.

The report also confirmed previous allegations that Rosenstein discussed wearing a wire to record conversations with Trump and recruit Cabinet members of invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president.

When the allegation arose, Rosenstein claimed he was being facetious.

Among previously unreported aspects of the Trump draft letter was the president’s unhappiness with Comey allowing FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to be part of the Russia investigation.

Trump charged that McCabe was biased against him, citing the funding of his wife’s Virginia state Senate campaign by friends of Hillary Clinton.

Attorney General Sessions later fired McCabe for misleading investigators about his leaks to the media.

Rosenstein’s decision

Sources told the New York Review of Books that Comey’s refusal to state publicly whether Trump was under investigation was due to a decision made by Rosenstein and top DOJ official Dana Boente.

Rosenstein, the report said, “was nervous as he considered walking out of the White House with the letter in case he was detected spiriting it away.”

He feared that if he complied with Trump’s rationale for firing Comey “he himself might have unwittingly acted as an accessory to a presidential obstruction of justice.”

Rosenstein believed the letter was potentially incriminating evidence, the report said.

It was Rosenstein, after Sessions recused himself, who later appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

And while Mueller found no evidence of collusion and did not refer obstruction charges, Democrats in Congress now have subpoenaed Mueller and others to testify in an apparent attempt to redo the investigation.

Rosenstein, according to the report, said he never believed that a change of directors at FBI would alter the Russia investigation.

Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com

URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2019/06/stunner-rosenstein-in-rage-over-comey-trump-russia/