Thursday 26 July 2018

Leave poor Rod Rosenstein alone!

I feel terribly sorry for Rod Rosenstein. The US deputy attorney general is getting flak from every corner just because he is doing his job as best as he can. Trump seems to hate him and perhaps slightly fear him, the Republicans are using and abusing him to get inside the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation into alleged Russian/Trump campaign collusion and two senior Republicans want to impeach him for goodness sake. It seems to me that ever since he decided to ask Mueller to be a special counsel to investigate the election interference affair, he has been marked down by the president as enemy number two. Enemy number one being Mueller of course. Rosenstein looks a decent sort of bloke, fairly mild looking, the kind of person who might look as if he is not able to say boo to a goose but who is actually incredibly conscientious and quite determined to do the job he is supposed to do as the second most senior official at the Justice Department. He was landed right in it when his immediate boss, Jeff Sessions, attorney general, recused himself from being linked in anyway to the investigation into The Investigation because it was claimed and then admitted that during the campaign he, too, had met the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the rotund DC diplomat who had little quiet chats with many people in the Trump campaign. As he was working for the Trump campaign at the time, Sessions, much to Trump's fury who thought he was a friend, produced some Department of Justice regulation which stated he, as attorney general, would face a conflict of interest if he took overall charge of the investigation because he had a personal and political relationship with the individual at the centre of the said inquiry. ie Trump. So in stepped Rod Rosenstein, his deputy, and the flak started to fly almost immediately. He always looks forlorn and fairly miserable when he appears on television, as if he is afraid at any moment he's going to be stabbed in the back. Well, that's exactly what IS happening. These two Republican Representatives, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, want him impeached on the grounds that he has failed to cough up sensitive documents about the Mueller investigation to Congress. I assume Meadows and Jordan are plotting against Rosenstein with Trump's total acquiescence. Rosenstein will probably survive. Congress is about to break up for the summer recess, so it might all just blow away. But in the meantime poor old Rosenstein is having a tough time, no thanks to Boss Sessions who is probably patting himself on the back for that cunning recusing moment which let him off the hook now firmly yanking his deputy in all directions.

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