Rod Rosenstein Didn't 'Land the Plane.' He Made Sure It Never Left the Ground.

The New York Times reports the former deputy attorney general instructed Special Counsel Robert Mueller not to investigate Donald Trump's personal and financial ties to Russia.

By Charles P. Pierce
Aug 31, 2020



Sooner or later, even though the investigation into the president’s involvement with the Russian ratfcking in the 2016 election had been swept out of the news cycle by all manner of fresh hell, when last we left the saga, there was an unmistakable feeling that there had been a careeRosensteinist in the woodpile. On Sunday, The New York Times handed us a big old clue.

But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere...

Mr. Rosenstein concluded the F.B.I. lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary. Mr. Rosenstein determined that the investigators were acting too hastily in response to the firing days earlier of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, and he suspected that the acting bureau director who approved the opening of the inquiry, Andrew G. McCabe, had conflicts of interest.

“We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia,” Mr. McCabe said. “I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team. If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.”

More:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33848359/rod-rosenstein-trump-russia-block-robert-mueller/