The Daily - Rod Rosenstein’s Impossible Choice

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

President Trump has asked the Justice Department to look into whether the F.B.I. infiltrated his campaign in 2016 for political purposes. In response, the department granted the president’s team access to highly classified information from the special counsel’s Russia investigation. What’s behind this decision? Guest: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who covers the White House for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Trump is calling on the Justice Department to open an investigation into itself. Instead, the Justice Department is giving the president's team access to evidence being used in the special counsel's investigation. Why would it do that? It's Tuesday, May 22nd.

The president really using Twitter this morning to slam the New York Times and air his grievances and frustrations. Meanwhile, a new bombshell New York Times article. There's a big debate raging and more fallout continues from it. The president is back on Twitter. He's lashing out at the Justice Department and also at the New York Times. This over a new report about a previously unreported meeting at Trump Tower with a foreign country. So the Times published a story over the weekend that looked at a different Trump Tower meeting than the one we've all become familiar with, where Donald Trump Jr. met with Russians who were promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. Julie Davis covers the White House for the Times.

This time the meeting was with officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And they are discussions with the Trump campaign officials about potentially helping out the campaign. The reason it matters is because it's the first indication that we have that Mueller is not just looking at whether the Trump campaign worked with Russians during the election season, but also whether they may have worked

with other foreign governments who were either offering up or actually providing help to Donald Trump and whether they were also coordinating with the Russians. So it just gives a sense of an avenue that we weren't really aware existed in this investigation of the entire Russia meddling picture. So this is sort of the latest sign that the Mueller investigation continues to expand in its scope. And this time, it's literally expanding to entire other countries. That's right.

And it may well be that Mueller has been looking down this avenue for quite some time, but it's just now that we're getting wind of it. And every time one of these things becomes public, the president gets another little bit of a glimpse of how big this investigation really is, how much Mueller and his team really know. And, you know, it's just continuing to go on and on. And that makes the president extremely angry and it makes him want to lash out. Let me read you what he has just tweeted. Things are really getting ridiculous.

The failing and crooked, but not as crooked as Hillary Clinton, New York Times, has done a long and boring story indicating that the world's most expensive witch hunt has found nothing on Russia and me, so now they are looking at the rest of the world. But interestingly, he didn't take issue with anything in the story. He didn't call it fake news. And there's a pause of a few hours. And then he tweets again. And he says, I hear by demand and will do so officially tomorrow that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI slash DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump campaign for political purposes. And if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama administration. Julie, tell me more about this incident that Trump is asking his Department of Justice to look into. What happened? Well, for a long time now, he has been complaining about the fact that we know that several of his campaign officials were wiretapped.

that we know that several of his campaign officials were wiretapped. But the more recent factor for the president that has him talking about whether his campaign was infiltrated is some information that we reported on last week that the FBI actually had an informant. The New York Times and Washington Post reporting that the FBI had an informant go talk to a couple members of the Trump campaign. According to the reports, the FBI did indeed send an informant to talk to three Trump campaign advisors after receiving evidence that they had suspicious contacts with Russia. The informant, who according to the Washington Post, was a retired American professor,

interacted with Trump campaign members George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, and Sam Clovis. When this first came out, the president was really angry and talked about how inappropriate it was. And he alleged that the person was a spy that was planted in his campaign. We've come to learn through reporting of my colleagues here in the D.C. Bureau that the reason that these informants were sent in was because they had uncovered contacts that Trump campaign officials had with Russians, and they wanted to look into what they were. And further, there was a sort of political timing motivation here, not in the way that the president is representing it, that they were out to get the campaign, but they were close enough to the election that they didn't want the

spectacle of doing a big FBI interview of these people, that it would be, you know, they thought a more practical way to go about it to have an informant ask some questions and see was there really anything to this or were they going down a wrong path. But, you know, it's not as if they were double agents who went and applied for jobs on the Trump campaign so they could spy on people. They were doing the work that an FBI informant often does where, you know, you get a meeting with someone, you go to dinner with them, you talk to them, you try to get information out of them that's in a less overt way than you would in a face-to-face interview saying, hello, I am, you know, Julie Davis from the FBI. Please answer these 10 questions. And is there a reason for the president to be outraged by this arrangement, given that this was happening

under a Democratic president and in the middle of a very heated presidential campaign as he's running against Hillary Clinton? I think this president is very paranoid about this whole investigation. So he believes there's a very good reason to be suspicious. It happened while Obama was president, so he then believes that it was somehow directed by Democrats. But, you know, it's very typical to have an informant in a big investigation like this, or several informants. This is not necessarily considered a huge deal. It's not necessarily something that goes all the way up the chain of command,

and certainly not to the president himself. So the notion that Barack Obama was sitting at his desk saying, I see we're going to help Hillary Clinton by sending a spy into the Trump campaign. It's just not the way these things typically work. But that's clearly the way Trump sees it. And that is the way, whether or not it's true, he is representing it to the public. And I think he's trying to undercut the whole investigation, which he's been doing all along. But I think he's also trying to set up this narrative where the public and particularly his own supporters see the Mueller investigation as a democratic, partisan-motivated witch hunt hoax, just the way he does, and that there's two different sides basically

to sort of boil it down into this fact-free partisan spitting match between him and his democratic detractors but so the president in this tweet is asking his department of justice to look into this and determine if it was, in fact, a political act intended to hurt him and if the Obama administration was somehow involved. That's right. And you have to understand that this is not just any old matter he's asking the Department of Justice to look into. There is an ongoing special counsel investigation into this issue of whether and how Russia meddled in the presidential election. So by asking for this other investigation, he's

essentially intervening in an ongoing investigation. He's saying, hold up, I want you to investigate the very basis for the special counsel probe. Right. He's asking for an investigation of the investigation of him. Correct. Julie, could this be construed as the latest piece of evidence that this president is trying to obstruct justice when it comes to the special counsel investigation? Absolutely. He has basically dispensed with any idea that he is not trying to use his power, use his office to try to influence the way this investigation goes.

He's called for an end to it. He's fired the FBI director. He's thought about firing the deputy attorney general. And this is just the latest example of him sort of throwing all the usual standards out the window and saying, I want this thing over. I don't think this thing has a basis. And I am going to use my power to try to act on that. The irony here is that the more he tries to influence the Mueller investigation, the more he tries to speed up its completion, the more he seems to be contributing to it and prolonging it and giving the special counsel more things to look into.

We'll be right back. So how did the Justice Department respond to the president saying that he was going to issue this order and demand that it investigate itself? So there was a several-hour lull on Sunday after the president made this demand by tweet and wasn't hearing anything from the Justice Department. I wasn't hearing anything from the White House about how he planned to carry this out. of thing from the White House about how he planned to carry this out. In the intervening hours, I spoke to a number of people who were very concerned about how Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who is overseeing the special counsel investigation, was going to react to this. They felt that, you know, it's pretty clear that the Justice Department can't just say how high when the president says jump, that that's not appropriate. And that Rosenstein,

being a career Justice Department person, would not be willing to do that. And again, he made this comment recently that, you know, the Justice Department won't be extorted. So the question was, what are his options? If he's not willing to do that, will he resign instead of doing that? Will he say no and be fired by the president for not doing that? And finally, on Sunday evening, Rosenstein put out a statement, and he found this kind of middle ground where he said the Justice Department is going to ask its inspector general to look into the question that the president had raised. And he said, you know, of course, if there's somebody who has infiltrated or surveilled a campaign for political purposes, of course, we would want to know about that and act on that. But in doing that, you know, the subtext of that also is, and while that goes on, the special counsel investigation

is also going on uninterrupted. We are not opening a Justice Department investigation. We're not devoting Justice Department resources and investigators and lawyers into essentially carrying out what is a politically motivated investigation into whether there is an already existing politically motivated investigation. avoided either extreme and kind of came down somewhere in the middle and in the process issued this statement that in essence legitimized what the president had asked for without accepting it. But it's kind of like having your HR department look into the question of, did we do something wrong here? Could we improve our operations? Right.

It's inevitably not as flashy as an outside investigation. Well, right. And in particular, because the inspector general doesn't have prosecutorial power, if he found something wrong, he could write a report and that might force action by Congress or by someone else in the administration, but it would not lead to criminal charges. And that is clearly what the president would like to see if something was done wrong. So given that Trump knows that, do we know if the president is satisfied by the compromise that Rosenstein took here? Well, Rosenstein and Christopher Wray, the FBI director,

were at the White House on Monday talking to the president. And I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall, but I was not in the meeting. But afterwards, the White House did put out a statement that seemed to suggest that the president, at least for now, is satisfied with this. But there was a second line of the statement that actually was a lot more significant. And that was that they said that John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, will be convening a meeting with the FBI, the Justice Department, the intelligence community to review all this information about the investigation. from the president himself, from Republicans on Capitol Hill, to cough up some of this information,

potentially including the identities of these informants that the president is concerned about. And they've said no, and they've pushed back, and they've found ways around it. And now there's going to be a process wherein at least some of this information is going to be furnished to the White House. Hmm. So the Justice Department is agreeing to give the White House access to what

it has, the sort of evidence and the sort of information that the Mueller investigation is built around. To at least some of it. And, you know, the interesting thing here will be, you know, now they're going to have to kind of all go back to their desks, figure out what they can share and agree amongst themselves. What are they going to show to the president? But essentially what you have is the Justice Department pushing back and saying, we're not going to let you intervene in this investigation, but we are willing to give you some degree of access to what it is we're working with. And why would people in the Department of Justice, why does Rod Rosenstein do that?

Well, I think you have this immense pressure by the president of the United States. You have pressure from the oversight committees on Capitol Hill. It really creates this potential confrontation between the president and his own Justice Department. It's really untenable. And so the way these investigations work, some of this information is highly, highly classified, others, not so much. So they may be thinking if there are things that we can tell them, if there are ways that we can lay out what the basis was for this decision or that decision, it's better to do that than to get ourselves down this road of a confrontation

between the president and the Justice Department. So they have to figure out, short of resigning and leaving this to someone else, when they think it's a pretty important and vital function of the Justice Department, how they can continue to operate, how they can continue to keep this thing on its tracks. That's what they're focused on. how they can continue to keep this thing on its tracks, that's what they're focused on. And so they have to figure out ways to maneuver in this new reality that the president has presented them with. And I think that's what they're trying to do. It sounds like Rosenstein is trying not to have to resign or to get fired,

which perhaps helps explain why he's been such a difficult to decipher figure. On the one hand, we know he wrote that letter that became a justification for James Comey being fired as FBI director. On the other, he has allowed Robert Mueller to run this investigation despite how infuriating it is to the president. And now, back on the other side, he's giving the president access to Justice Department evidence. Right. I think that he is trying really hard not to resign and not to be fired. But he also has an attitude of, I am going to do my job the way I think is

appropriate. And I'm not going to worry about whether I'm going to get fired or not. I'm going to worry about whether this investigation can run its legitimate course, even as he's doing these things, giving questions that the president raises to the inspector general, trying to have this middle ground on information that they're showing the White House. He's also approving lots and lots of different requests from Mueller to investigate this, to investigate that. I mean, he oversees this investigation. Mueller can't look into questions that Rosenstein doesn't think are an avenue that he should be pursuing. So he's kind of got a very bifurcated role here. And I think he's trying to play both at the same time. And so that's sometimes why it looks from

the outside like he's whipsawing between one thing and another. I think he's got two really important jobs here and he's trying to do both. So presumably Rosenstein would have also approved the decision to investigate that second meeting at Trump Tower, the one that so infuriated the president when he read about it in The Times. Yes, it's definitely the case that if there were a moment where Mueller presented this to him and said, hey, can I look at this? He said yes, because this is clearly

now a point of investigation for Mueller. Julie, thank you very much. Always a pleasure, Michael. Here's what else you need to know today. Well, good morning, everyone. Two weeks ago, President Trump terminated the United States' participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. President Trump withdrew from the deal for a simple reason. It failed to guarantee the safety of the American people from the risk created by the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. No more. In his first major speech as Secretary

of State, Mike Pompeo said that despite the U.S. having pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, Iran must end all its nuclear enrichment programs. And in a direct appeal to the Iranian people, suggested they reject their clerical government. Next year marks the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Republic revolution in Iran. At this milestone, we have to ask, what has the Iranian revolution given to the Iranian people? The regime reaps a harvest of suffering and death in the Middle East. While Pompeo did not directly threaten the use of military force, he hinted at it if Iran restarts its nuclear program. To the Ayatollah, to President Rouhani, and to other Iranian leaders, understand that your current activities will be met with steely resolve.

And... One day after Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, declared victory in his re-election, the Trump administration placed new economic sanctions on the country, condemning its government as a dictatorship and calling the election undemocratic. Maduro's government had barred many opposition parties from running against him and used food as an incentive to get hungry Venezuelans to vote.

In a statement, Vice President Mike Pence said, quote, the illegitimate result of this fake process is a further blow to the proud democratic tradition of Venezuela. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.