Saturday 22 September 2018

Rod Rosenstein, super plotter or innocent wit?

I've never met Rod Rosenstein, the mild-looking deputy attorney general of the United States of America, but I've seen him in action on the TV and in the newspapers and he doesn't seem to me to be a cunning plotter hoping to bring down President Donald J Trump. I think, although I hate to say it against my brother journalists, that the New York Times may have got this scoop somewhat skewed. They claim Rosenstein last year raised the possibility of wearing a wire when going to see Trump in the White House and that he felt confident he could persuade General John Kelly, chief of staff, and Jeff Sessions, his boss and attorney general, to cite the 25th Amendment to chuck out Trump from the White House on the grounds, presumably, that the president no longer had the required faculties to be the US commander-in-chief and was downright dangerous to boot. He didn't say the last bit. I am surmising. Strangely enough I can just about see Sessions saying these sort of things because he must have had it up to here with Trump's insults and rudery. Trump has been openly plotting against Sessions for months. But Rosenstein? Not in my book. He MAY have thought it and MAY have even whispered it with a smile on his face to a few chums, but actually intended to carry it out? In other words, a coup!? I really don't think so. If the New York Times story is true, I mean every word of it, and there is proof somewhere, then Rosenstein is like that dead parrot in the Monty Python sketch. He is no more, he has departed this life, it is over for him. I also don't see General Kelly as a plotter. This is a four-star Marine Corps general for heaven's sake. For a man like him it would be tantamount to treason. He would have thrown Rosenstein out of the White House if he so much as mentioned the word amendment, let alone the 25th. The 25th Amendment of course is the ruse by which those closest to the president, any president, can frogmarch the commander-in-chief out of the Oval Office and remove him to a funny farm. It's all part of the wonderful US constitution. But for someone like Rosenstein, a relatively inferior official in the great scheme of things Washington, to have a go at launching a 25th at Trump is so unlikely it makes me think someone somewhere, or several people, have been watching too many reruns of the TV drama series Designated Survivor! The only thing that worries me is Rosenstein's response to the New York Times story. He jumped in quickly to say that the story was "inaccurate and factually incorrect". That sounds like a very careful choice of words by a highly qualified lawyer. What he could have said was: "Excuse the French but this story is bollocks." But then maybe deputy attorney generals don't talk that. But if he had, his denial would have been much more convincing.

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