rosenstein, rod

wow, belated<div>running interference for mueller, caved on gang 8 nunes, trey gowdy?
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</div><div>=</div><div>ref 2no lnx <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/politics/andrew-weissmann-mueller.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/politics/andrew-weissmann-mueller.html</a>Mueller’s Team Should Have Done More to Investigate Trump-Russia Links, Top Aide SaysA new book by one of the special counsel’s top deputies, Andrew Weissmann, is the first inside account of the investigation.
“We could have done more,” Andrew Weissmann, who was one of the top aides in the special counsel’s office, writes in a new book.By Charlie SavageSept. 21, 2020
WASHINGTON — The team led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, failed to do everything it could to determine what happened in the 2016 election, shying away from steps like subpoenaing President Trump and scrutinizing his finances out of fear he would fire them, one of Mr. Mueller’s top lieutenants argued in the first insider account of the inquiry.“Had we used all available tools to uncover the truth, undeterred by the onslaught of the president’s unique powers to undermine our efforts?” wrote the former prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, in a new book, adding, “I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more.”The team took elaborate steps to protect its files of evidence from the risk that the Justice Department might destroy them if Mr. Trump fired them and worked to keep reporters and the public from learning what they were up to, Mr. Weissmann wrote in “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation,” which Random House will publish next week.While he speaks reverently of Mr. Mueller, he also says his boss’s diffidence made him ill-suited for aspects of shepherding the politically charged investigation. He saw Mr. Mueller and his deputy, Aaron M. Zebley, as overly cautious.Mr. Weissmann also defended against accusations by the president and his allies that he and other investigators were politically biased “angry Democrats”; Mr. Weissmann said his personal views had no bearing on the crimes that Russian operatives and Trump aides committed.And he elevates particular details — for example, emphasizing that the same business account that sent hush payments to an adult film star who alleged an extramarital affair with Mr. Trump had also received “payments linked to a Russian oligarch.” The president has denied the affair; his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen controlled the account. Mr. Mueller transferred the Cohen matter to prosecutors in New York.Previously a mafia and Enron prosecutor and then a lawyer at the F.B.I. for Mr. Mueller, who was the bureau’s director for 12 years, Mr. Weissmann ran one of three major units for the special counsel’s office. His “Team M” prosecuted Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for numerous financial crimes. The goal was to flip him and learn whatever he knew about any Trump campaign links to Russia.Mr. Manafort had worked for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, and the investigation uncovered ties by his business partner, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, to Russian intelligence. The book builds toward investigators’ discovery that Mr. Manafort had shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, who flew to the United States to meet with Mr. Manafort during the campaign, asking whether Mr. Trump would permit a peace plan for Russia to essentially take over all of eastern Ukraine.But while admitting this much, Mr. Manafort — seeing the dangle of a potential pardon from Mr. Trump — refused to cooperate further. Investigators did not obtain any final puzzle pieces and lacked the evidence to charge anyone in the campaign with a criminal conspiracy involving Russia’s covert electoral assistance.“It would seem to require significant audacity — or else, leverage — for another nation to even put such a request before a presidential candidate,” Mr. Weissmann wrote of Mr. Kilimnik’s request. “This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t know to this day, monumentally disconcerting: Namely, why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to this Russian proposal if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return?”Mr. Weissmann explained the significance of Mr. Manafort’s interactions with Mr. Kilimnik — also a major focus of a recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which explicitly labeled Mr. Kilimnik a Russian intelligence agent — more clearly than the Mueller report did.Mr. Mueller had strictly forbidden leaks, and the special counsel team took extraordinary care to protect the high-profile, high-stakes investigation, Mr. Weissmann wrote. They kept window blind slats tilted at an angle to keep out prying eyes, shutting out natural light. They concocted an “almost comically elaborate and surreal” plan to sneak in “through the many hidden arteries of the courthouse” to obtain a grand jury indictment without tipping off reporters.And worried about the possibility that Mr. Trump would fire them and the Justice Department would then seal off or destroy their evidence, the Mueller team members packed their numerous applications to judges for search warrants with extensive, up-to-date details about their investigation — ensuring they backed up their work beyond the reach of the executive branch.Ty Cobb, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, also privately promised to be a “canary in the coal mine” and provide a heads up if Mr. Trump was going to fire the special counsel team, according to Mr. Weissmann. In an email, Mr. Cobb wrote that he “never made the commitment” described by Mr. Weissmann.The investigation played out against the backdrop of regular vilification of the Mueller team by Mr. Trump and his allies like Fox News’s Sean Hannity — who turned out to be in regular contact with Mr. Manafort cooking up a “smear campaign” over text messages. Mr. Weissmann, a major target, wrote that such “ad hominem” insinuations of bias appealed to emotion rather than reason.“I am a registered Democrat,” he wrote. “Does this make Paul Manafort or any of the other 32 people our office charged any less guilty? Did Russia not attack our democracy and disrupt our election with its self-described online information warfare operation? Which facts that we alleged in our various indictments — and to which many of those we indicted, including Manafort, would plead guilty — did our attackers believe were invented as a result of our alleged bias as ‘angry Democrats?’”Mr. Trump’s allies have recently pointed with alarm to documents showing that cellphones issued to Mr. Mueller’s team were erased during the investigation; Mr. Weissmann twice entered an incorrect passcode too often, triggering a security measure that erased his phone. In an interview, he portrayed the concerns as a “tempest in a teapot” and said his understanding was that all emails and other such data from phones were backed up. He called on the Justice Department to release information about the special counsel’s data backup system.Mr. Weissmann also wrote that he is not “anti-Trump” but rather “pro the rule of law.” Still, the distinction is less than clear in a book that also portrays Mr. Trump as a liar and a dangerous demagogue trying “to peel the world around him away from the rule of law — away from reason itself — and mold it to accommodate his desire for unchecked power.”Mr. Weissmann was equally scathing about Attorney General William P. Barr, calling him an enabler and likening his misleading letter last spring about the then-still-secret Mueller report as a betrayal and “gut punch.”Mr. Weissmann also criticized colleagues, portraying the special counsel team as divided between aggressive investigators like him, the F.B.I. special agent Omer Meisel and the prosecutor Jeannie Rhee — who headed “Team R,” which investigated Russian issues other than those centered on Manafort — and far more risk-averse law enforcement officials like Mr. Zebley who pulled punches.In one episode in 2017, the Mueller team issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank for information about Mr. Manafort’s income in Ukraine. Deutsche Bank had also lent large sums to the Trump Organization, and the White House somehow found out about the still-secret subpoenas — though not their focus. The White House demanded to know what investigators were doing, and Mr. Mueller authorized Mr. Zebley to tell the White House that they had not been seeking Mr. Trump’s financial information.“At that point, any financial investigation of Trump was put on hold,” Mr. Weissmann writes. “That is, we backed down — the issue was simply too incendiary; the risk, too severe.”The book provides many other examples of concessions large and small. Investigators did not try to question Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka — who had spoken in the lobby to a delegation of Russians who came to Trump Tower in June 2016 to meet with campaign leaders who had been promised that they were offering dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.They “feared that hauling her in for an interview would play badly to the already antagonistic right-wing press — look how they’re roughing up the president’s daughter — and risk enraging Trump, provoking him to shut down the special counsel’s office once and for all,” he wrote.Similarly, they did not subpoena the Trump Organization for emails about its efforts to develop a Trump-branded building in Moscow, which were active deep into the 2016 campaign.And they did not immunize Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., a step that would have prevented him from being able to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying about matters like the Trump Tower meeting. Bound by grand-jury secrecy rules, Mr. Weissmann did not come out and say whether Donald Trump Jr. was threatened with or actually issued a subpoena and used his right against self-incrimination to repel it.Mr. Weissmann laid much of the blame for what he saw as a pattern of timidity on Mr. Zebley, portraying him as a primary decision maker. “Repeatedly during our 22 months in operation, we would reach some critical juncture in our investigation only to have Aaron say that we could not take a particular action because it risked aggravating the president beyond some undefined breaking point.”Mr. Weissmann acknowledged, but did not clearly address, concerns that the aging Mr. Mueller had lost a step, both declaring that he was capable of making the tough decisions despite “speculative concerns” about his health but also describing him in one scene as looking drained and worn down by his years of grueling public service.While Mr. Zebley obtained Mr. Mueller’s sanction for many of his cautious directives, in one striking episode, Mr. Zebley appeared in Mr. Weissmann’s telling to have unilaterally agreed — without Mr. Mueller’s knowledge — to a request by the office of the deputy attorney general overseeing them, Rod J. Rosenstein, not to coordinate with state prosecutors “as it would undermine the president’s pardon power.”Two other former officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, disputed the account. Mr. Rosenstein did not decline any request to share information with state prosecutors, a person familiar with his thinking wrote in an email.Another person familiar with how the special counsel’s office interacted with Mr. Rosenstein’s office denied that there had been any agreement about sharing evidence with or withholding it from state prosecutors, and said Mr. Zebley had consulted with Mr. Mueller on every material decision.On the failure to subpoena Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller was determined to avoid “any public disagreements” with Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Weissmann wrote. Because the special counsel regulations required telling Congress about any instance in which Mr. Rosenstein overruled him, Mr. Mueller never actually proposed subpoenaing Mr. Trump, instead coyly asking what Mr. Rosenstein’s reaction would be. Mr. Rosenstein just kept demurring.In the end, Mr. Weissmann said in an interview, the caution was more justified early on to avoid provoking Mr. Trump into firing them before they could get going. But he and Ms. Rhee, among others, believed the office should have been willing to be more aggressive later on, after they had learned much of what Russia had done and had already used indictments to drag it into public view.“We would have subpoenaed the president after he refused our accommodations, even if that risked us being fired,” he wrote. “It just didn’t sit right. We were left feeling like we had let down the American public, who were counting on us to give it our all.”</div><div>
</div><div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rosenstein-blocked-fbi-from-probing-trumps-russian-ties-then-ordered-mueller-to-ignore-them-as-well">https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rosenstein-blocked-fbi-from-probing-trumps-russian-ties-then-ordered-mueller-to-ignore-them-as-well</a></div><div>
</div><div>One of the many oddities of the now-terminated Robert Mueller probe into Russian election interference and its links to various members of the Trump campaign and family, and in fact of all known federal probes into Russia’s Trump-related actions, has been the seeming lack of any counterintelligence probe on Donald Trump’s myriad, longstanding financial connections to Russia—and what role those financial ties have played both in the Russian government’s actions on behalf of Trump and their possible leverage over the now-president.</div><div>
</div><div class="story-intro story-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/politics/trump-russia-justice-department.html" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">A new story from The New York Times‘ Michael Schmidt</a> reports that that’s because in the first months of the new Trump administration, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein shuttered that investigation—then ordered special counsel Robert Mueller to steer clear of it himself. It’s not that the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s known ties to Russian crime figures, to money laundering, and his family’s stated reliance on Russian cash has been kept closely-held: It never existed. And it still doesn’t.</div><div class="row" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="col-sm-12" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="story-body story-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The accusation being leveled by acting Federal Bureau of Investigation director Andrew McCabe against Rosenstein goes further, suggesting that Rosenstein intentionally misled him. Schmidt reports that McCabe launched a counterintelligence probe into Trump’s Russian ties immediately after Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey, a move that was widely publicly speculated to be a Trump move to quash investigations into Russian election actions and into numerous of Trump’s top advisers and allies. The fear within the intelligence community was that Trump’s behaviors could be impacted by unknown Russian pressures, representing an immediate national security threat.Rosenstein, however, ordered the probe shut down. Rosenstein did not tell McCabe that directly, says Schmidt, but instead left McCabe “with the impression that the special counsel would take on [that] investigation” as part of Mueller’s overall Russian interference inquiry.but separately, Rosenstein told Mueller that he wasn’t to pursue the counterintelligence concerns either.That means no federal investigation into Trump’s Russian cash have been undertaken during his presidency, despite numerous papers and journalists themselves identifying significant ties between Donald Trump’s finances and individuals close to the Russian government. Not by intelligence officials, not by the special counsel’s team, and not the Senate’s own Russia probes. Through the entirety of Trump’s term, all probes of financial ties to Russian interests—which he has retained, even in the presidency—have each been blocked.Schmidt’s claims here seem impossible to fully believe. It would require that federal law enforcement officials turn a blind eye to a potentially massive national security threat—the very real chance that Trump was and is being intimidated into, or merely bribed into, pursuing Putin-preferred policies damaging to the United States. Trump’s moves to weaken NATO, his pressure on allies to weaken Russian sanctions and re-elevate Russia as economic leader, and his mostly-successful sabotage of the Ukrainian government’s ability to push back Russian forces during a key Russian military push have each been contrary to longstanding U.S. interests. None have been competently explained, not even by Trump’s own national security officials.<a href="https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/08/30/both-rod-rosenstein-and-richard-burr-chose-not-to-investigate-trumps-biggest-counterintelligence-vulnerability/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">As expert Marcy Wheeler suggests</a>, that both Rosenstein and Sen. Richard Burr specifically chose, in their probes, “not to look into the most obvious source of compromise suggests that someone knows what they would find.” After Trump’s continued pattern of gleeful lawbreaking, it’s now more plausible to believe Trump is acting for personal financial gain in his dealings with Russia than it is to believe his actions rest on any supposed ideological foundation. The Senate and Justice Department both continue to make rigorously sure, however, to leave those questions intentionally unanswered.</div></div></div><div></div></div><div>=
"we are all capitalists here"<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/walmart-was-almost-criminally-charged-over-opioids-trump-appointees-killed-the-indictment/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/walmart-was-almost-criminally-charged-over-opioids-trump-appointees-killed-the-indictment/</a>
no lnx
Walmart was almost criminally charged over opioids. Trump appointees killed the indictmentImage via Screengrab.Written by Jesse Eisinger, James Bandler / Pro Publica March 25, 2020ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
On a Tuesday just before Halloween in 2018, a group of federal prosecutors and agents from Texas arrived in Washington. For almost two years, they’d been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice.
The prosecution team had come to Washington to try to save its case. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, led the group, which included Heather Rattan, an over-20-year veteran of the office who had spent much of her career prosecuting members of drug cartels.
They first went to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s headquarters to meet the acting administrator, Uttam Dhillon. There Rattan laid out the evidence. Opioids dispensed by Walmart pharmacies in Texas had killed customers who had overdosed. The pharmacists who dispensed those opioids had told the company they didn’t want to fill the prescriptions because they were coming from doctors who were running pill mills. They pleaded for help and guidance from Walmart’s corporate office.
Investigators had obtained records of similar cries for help from Walmart pharmacists all over the country: from Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington, and other states. They reported hundreds of thousands of suspicious or inappropriate opioid prescriptions. One Walmart employee warned about a Florida doctor who had a “list of patients from Kentucky that have been visiting pharmacies in all of central Wisconsin recently.” That doctor had sent patients to Walmarts in more than 30 other states.
In response to these alarms, Walmart compliance officials did not take corporate-wide action to halt the flow of opioids. Instead, they repeatedly admonished pharmacists that they could not cut off any doctor entirely. They could only evaluate each prescription on an individual basis. And they went further. An opioid compliance manager told an executive in an email, gathered during the inquiry and viewed by ProPublica, that Walmart’s focus should be on “driving sales.”
After they finished their presentation, Dhillon sat back in his chair and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ,” according to five people familiar with the investigation. “Why aren’t we talking about this as a criminal case?”
That’s precisely what had occurred seven months earlier: Rattan had informed Walmart that she was preparing to indict the corporation for violating the Controlled Substances Act. Indictments of Fortune 500 companies are unheard of, let alone of one with $500 billion in annual revenue and over 2 million employees. But Rattan, with support from her boss Brown, believed the evidence justified such an unprecedented step.
Before the Texas prosecutors could file their case, however, Walmart escalated concerns to high-ranking officials at the DOJ, who then intervened. Brown was ordered to stand down. On Aug. 31, 2018, Trump officials officially informed Walmart that the DOJ would decline to prosecute the company, according to a letter from Walmart’s lawyer that lays out the chronology of the case.
But the Texas prosecutors hadn’t given up. Now, two months later, they still thought they had a chance to bring the then-deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, and other top officials around. After the first presentation at the DEA offices that day, the Texas group — now accompanied by the DEA’s Dhillon — caravanned over to the DOJ....</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>politico

no lnx?

pix
ome supporters of President Donald Trump see a threat bigger than the spread of a highly contagious novel coronavirus: a conspiracy by deep state actors to use the virus against the president.
One key piece of evidence fueling their theory: An official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention making public statements on the outbreak is the sister of Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who oversaw the Mueller probe and, according to a disputed report, once discussed removing Trump from office.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, head of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — who got a shoutout from her brother for attending his 2017 confirmation hearing — warned Americans in a Tuesday media briefing that an outbreak in the U.S. is inevitable.

Messonnier’s comments got widespread attention, sparking calls for further actions by the administration, which had long struck a more reassuring note. The furor appeared to catch Trump flat-footed while en route back from his summit with the Indian prime minister, during which he had declared the outbreak "very well under control."

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, head of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. | Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The likes of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and Jim Hoft, publisher of the Gateway Pundit, a conspiratorial, pro-Trump site, have seized on the sibling connection, as have a large number of anonymous Twitter accounts.
“Rod Rosenstein as we all know definitely worked to undermine the Trump administration, which is oddly exactly what his sister is doing by undermining the more logical and calm message the president’s team has issued on the virus,” conservative pundit Wayne Dupree charged in a Wednesday blog post.

Global financial markets have been sliding for several days over concerns about the fallout from the virus, a trend that threatens Trump’s rosy economic message as well as his political future.
Yet there is no evidence that federal health authorities are overstating the threat of coronavirus to prosecute a political vendetta against Trump, and some conservatives — even as they praised the administration’s response — rushed to defend Messonnier.
</div></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/heres-how-trumps-political-appointees-overruled-tougher-settlements-with-big-banks/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/heres-how-trumps-political-appointees-overruled-tougher-settlements-with-big-banks/</a>no lnx
Here’s how Trump’s political appointees overruled tougher settlements with big banks PBS NewshourWritten by Jesse Eisinger, Kevin Wack / ProPublica August 2, 2019This article was produced in partnership with American Banker.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published. Since Donald Trump’s election, federal white-collar enforcement has taken a big hit. Fines and settlements against corporations have plummeted. Prosecutions of individuals are falling to record lows.But just how these fines and settlements came to be slashed is less well understood. Two settlements with giant banks over financial crisis-era misdeeds provide a window into how the Trump administration has eased up on corporate wrongdoers.In settlements last year with the two big U.K.-based banks, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland, political appointees at the Trump administration Justice Department took the unusual step of overruling staff prosecutors to reduce the settlements sought, leaving billions of dollars in potential recoveries on the table, according to four people familiar with the settlements.
In the case of RBS, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided that the charges should not be pursued as a criminal case, as the prosecutorial team advocated, but rather as a less serious civil one.Both cases were developed by the Obama administration DOJ and involved accusations that the banks misled buyers of residential mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 financial crisis. Prosecutors seemingly found numerous examples of bankers knowingly selling lemons to their customers. The mortgages they were putting into securities were “total fucking garbage,” one RBS executive said in a phone call that was recorded and cited in a DOJ filing. A Barclays banker said a group of loans “scares the shit out of me.” Mortgages that went into the two banks’ securities lost a total of $73 billion, according to calculations used by the government.In March 2018, the DOJ settled with Barclays for $2 billion, a sum dictated by Trump appointees that was far below what the staff prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn had sought. The settlement with RBS occurred in August 2018, for $4.9 billion. After Rosenstein downgraded the case from criminal to civil, other Trump appointees concluded that the settlement amount should be about half of what staff prosecutors in the District of Massachusetts had sought.
DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Sutton said that the Barclays and RBS settlements held the banks accountable for serious misconduct, and that the penalties recovered from the banks were fair and proportionate compared with those previously obtained from other banks. She did not respond to detailed questions about how the two settlements were reached and why key decisions were dictated from Washington. “They were largely negotiated by career attorneys in the Department and U.S. Attorneys’ offices with the support and collaboration of Department leadership,” Sutton wrote in an email.
Aspects of how the DOJ came to settle the cases have been recounted. The New York Times reported on Rosenstein’s decision in the RBS case. But this is the first extensive account of how the banks secured the favorable outcomes.
The British banks employed an old playbook, one that proved effective with the Trump administration: Hire prominent former high-level DOJ officials who were now at major law firms. These attorneys won access to the top echelons of the Trump DOJ, where they found an audience receptive to their arguments that the staff prosecutors were unfairly singling out their clients for excess punishment.
The two cases stemmed from the Obama administration’s efforts to bring charges against banks for misdeeds that contributed to the financial crisis. Critics assailed the Obama DOJ for what they perceived as tardy and inadequate policing of financial crisis malfeasance. For example, the Obama DOJ did not prosecute any top bankers for actions related to the crisis. But it did belatedly bring civil charges, and it reached large settlements with numerous banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. Moreover, the Obama-era DOJ consistently required the banks to acknowledge their bad acts, a practice that has ceased during the Trump administration.
As the Obama administration was winding up in the fall of 2016, the DOJ had not completed all that it aspired to. It rushed to reach settlements with foreign banks that had shown less urgency to resolve the allegations than some of their U.S. counterparts.
Less than a week before Trump’s inauguration, the DOJ announced that Deutsche Bank had agreed to pay a $3.1 billion civil penalty, and that Credit Suisse would pay $2.48 billion. But there were holdouts, including Barclays and RBS.
Prosecutors in Brooklyn wanted Barclays to pay somewhere within a range in the high single digits of billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. Barclays balked, drawing a line at $2 billion, according to a Bloomberg News account.
Barclays hired an all-star team of defense lawyers. The roster included Karen Seymour, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who had previously served as chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and has since become general counsel at Goldman Sachs.
Also on Barclays’ legal team was Kannon Shanmugam, a former high-ranking official in the George W. Bush DOJ who was then a partner at Williams & Connolly.
With the two sides far apart in December 2016, the DOJ sued Barclays. Prosecutors also brought civil charges against two former executives at the bank who played key roles in its pre-crisis subprime mortgage operations.
Suing was an unusual step — cases against large corporations normally settle before a complaint is filed — and it was meant to send an implicit message to Barclays. Because the DOJ had been forced to go to court, the British bank could expect the price tag of an eventual settlement to be higher.
Barclays was making the opposite bet: that it would be able to negotiate a more favorable settlement once Trump appointees were in place at DOJ.
In a 192-page complaint, the DOJ alleged that Barclays engaged in fraud on a massive scale, deceiving investors about the characteristics of mortgages used to create securities that sold for tens of billions of dollars.
A Barclays employee commented during a 2006 phone call that one particular pool of mortgages was “about as bad as it can be,” but he did not abandon the loans or modify the bank’s standard disclosures to investors, according to the government’s complaint. In another example, when that same banker said that a particular pool of loans “scares the shit out of me,” because he believed the company that originated the mortgages was likely to go bankrupt soon, Barclays bought the loans anyway. The bank deliberately did not conduct due diligence on the mortgages and then packaged them into bonds, the complaint asserted, all the while falsely telling a rating agency that due diligence had been done on 100% of the loans.
“More than half of the underlying loans defaulted,” the complaint stated, causing huge losses for investors.
Barclays’ legal team argued that the bank should not pay higher penalties in a settlement than other banks had paid relative to their market share. Barclays had been a relatively small player in the residential mortgage-backed securities, or RMBS, market, and its settlement should be sized accordingly, they reasoned.
This was an argument that the DOJ had long rejected. In a 2014 speech, then-Associate Attorney General Tony West argued that a firm’s market share should not outweigh evidence of the extent of its wrongdoing. “The facts and evidence of a particular case — they are what will ultimately matter the most,” he said.
In the Barclays matter, prosecutors in Brooklyn believed they had a strong case. The judge assigned to the case, U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, seemed to agree. “This complaint is probably one of the more fulsome complaints I’ve ever seen,” Matsumoto said at an April 2017 hearing.
But the view that ultimately mattered was the one held by a new crop of officials at Main Justice, the DOJ’s headquarters in Washington. Besides Rosenstein, who was not involved in the Barclays case, key players in the RMBS settlements included Trump administration political appointees in the associate attorney general’s office, according to people familiar with the talks.
Steve Cox, the deputy associate attorney general, oversaw the cases, reporting to Jesse Panuccio, the principal deputy associate attorney general. In February 2018, Panuccio became acting associate attorney general, the No. 3 position at the DOJ, after Rachel Brand resigned from the post.
Neither had much experience with federal prosecutions. Panuccio was a former lawyer to Florida Gov. Rick Scott, as well as the chief labor and land use official in Florida, and Cox was a onetime associate at WilmerHale who had spent six years as a corporate counsel at an oil company, Apache Corporation, before joining the DOJ.
Following communications with the Barclays legal team, DOJ officials in Washington conveyed a message to the staff prosecutors in Brooklyn: settle the case within a narrow range around $2 billion, or we will take the negotiations out of your hands. The instruction came via a spreadsheet that listed the dollar range.
For DOJ officials in Washington to dictate specific terms of a settlement was unusual. U.S. attorney offices generally have wide latitude in choosing what they investigate and in making prosecutorial decisions. “Involvement of DOJ in cases handled in the U.S. attorney’s offices is not common” but happens on big cases from time to time, said Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at Patterson Belknap. During Obama-era negotiations, Main Justice had tried to show a united front with prosecutors who’d investigated the RMBS cases, according to former department officials.
At least one prosecutor acknowledged the internal rift between Brooklyn and Washington to the Barclays’ defense team, according to a source familiar with the matter. Once prosecutors in Brooklyn learned Main Justice’s position, this prosecutor communicated to the Barclays side that the bank had prevailed. Recalling how the deal went down, one government official said: “It seemed like a defeat.”
The staff prosecutors weren’t just disappointed about settling for a fraction of what they had sought back in 2016. They had brought civil charges against two former Barclays employees, Paul Menefee and John Carroll, and in exchange for dismissal, the two men agreed to pay a combined $2 million. But the agreement did not include language that precluded Barclays from footing the bill. That meant that Menefee and Carroll, who did not admit wrongdoing, might not have to pay a dime out of their own pockets.
Lawyers for Menefee and Carroll did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said, “The substantial penalty Barclays and its executives had to pay was an important step in recognizing the harm that was caused to the national economy and to investors in RMBS.”
At Main Justice, at least one official also regretted the Barclays deal, but from the opposite perspective. Cox told a prosecutor that he wished the Barclays settlement had been even smaller, but he explained that it wasn’t feasible to go lower because it had been reported that the bank offered to pay $2 billion, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Cox did not respond to requests for comment.
Panuccio, who stepped down from the DOJ in the spring, declined to answer specific questions, citing the confidentiality of the department’s process. In an email response, he said, “The general narrative the questions seem to suggest is belied by the facts — including the fact that DOJ recovered historically significant sums in its 2018 and 2019 FIRREA settlements, and the fact that DOJ filed a major FIRREA suit against UBS in November 2018.” (FIRREA is the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, a law dating from the savings and loan scandals of the late ’80s.)
Barclays declined to comment.
While Barclays had been in active negotiations with the DOJ during the Obama administration, the RBS defense team had not. RBS did not want to enter negotiations until the prosecutors dropped the criminal investigation.
Boston prosecutors declined to do so. Mortgages that went into RBS’ securities suffered about $54 billion in losses, ravaging their customers’ investments. The prosecutors believed they had compiled damning evidence that RBS officials knew what they were doing was wrong. In one example, RBS’ chief credit officer in the United States called the mortgages that were going into the securities “total fucking garbage” with “fraud [that] was so rampant … [and] all random,” according to calls the prosecutors later quoted in the statement of facts against the bank. He stated that “the loans are all disguised to, you know, look okay kind of … in a data file.”
In 2016, the RBS defense team, which included former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, of WilmerHale, appealed to Stuart Delery, then the third-highest official at the DOJ. Delery knew Gorelick from their time at the DOJ. Despite that relationship, according to a person knowledgeable about the matter, Delery said he would not interfere with an ongoing investigation at a U.S. attorney’s office. (Delery did not respond to requests for comment. Gorelick directed questions to RBS.)
Then came November. A few months later, the Trump appointees arrived.
For a while, nothing changed. The Boston prosecutors continued their investigation, more convinced than ever that the RBS conduct merited a criminal charge. They wrote what’s known as a “prosecution memo,” which they had begun during the Obama administration, describing the underlying criminal acts under FIRREA.
Such a move would have been groundbreaking. The Obama DOJ had used FIRREA, but for civil charges. And the Boston prosecutors did not want to stop there. They argued for first charging the bank criminally, and then moving on to seek criminal charges against individual bankers. Those would have been the first of their kind.
They never got that far.
In time, Trump political appointees such as Panuccio and Cox began to figure out their way around the department. The RBS defense team, including Gorelick, requested meetings with top officials. Gorelick again had a connection with a key DOJ official. She had worked with Cox, earlier in his career when he was an associate at WilmerHale, defending BP in investigations of the Deepwater Horizon spill.
The defense group now also included Mark Filip of Kirkland & Ellis, representing the British government’s interest in RBS. Filip, who did not respond to requests for comment, has a special stature. During his tenure as deputy attorney general, he had codified the conditions prosecutors had to assess in bringing cases against corporations, which are today known as the “Filip Factors.” Prosecutors are supposed to weigh a variety of issues, such as how serious offenses are and whether the company has cooperated with investigators. As a private sector big hitter, companies hire him, in the view of prosecutors, to explain why his factors are not met in a given case.
The RBS team was able to meet with the No. 2 at the DOJ, Rosenstein. It’s unusual, though not unprecedented, for a defense team to get access to such a high-level official. The RBS team persuaded Rosenstein.
In the spring of 2018, Rosenstein informed Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, that his office couldn’t pursue criminal charges against RBS. Rosenstein said he didn’t want the DOJ treating RBS differently from other banks, which faced only civil investigations. (The Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the details of the RBS settlement. Rosenstein, who left the DOJ in May, did not respond to inquiries.)
RBS spokeswoman Linda Harper confirmed that the Boston U.S. attorney’s office had recommended criminal prosecution and that the bank had met first with Delery and then with Rosenstein.
“The argument we made was for fairness and parity,” she said. The bank’s defense team, she added, argued that “Main Justice should ensure that like cases are treated alike.”
The Boston team was disappointed and angry. It argued that prosecutors charge people when they have the necessary evidence, even if they cannot charge all people who committed the same crime. And it maintained that the decision went against department policy. In May 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo directing prosecutors to charge defendants with the most serious provable crimes carrying the highest penalties.
“It calls into question whether the memo meant what it says when it came to white-collar prosecutions,” a person familiar with the decision said.
Once the case was downgraded, the Boston team turned to deciding on the monetary settlement. Internally, prosecutors had discussed seeking a settlement in the $9 billion to $10 billion range, reflecting their belief that the RBS conduct was especially egregious.
At one point in the spring after the Rosenstein meetings, Main Justice sent Boston a similar spreadsheet that it sent to other U.S. attorney offices concerning their open cases, including those against Barclays, Japanese bank Nomura and Swiss bank UBS. For RBS, the range was between around $4.5 billion to about $6.6 billion.
The Boston prosecutors tried to get the settlement as close to the top of the range as they could. But they were thwarted even in that attempt. Cox told the Boston team that the DOJ would “call the bluff” of RBS and tell the bank it would take $4.9 billion.
Prosecutors thought the DOJ had caved. They complained to Cox that Main Justice had authorized the office to seek as much as $6.6 billion. Cox’s reply: But RBS won’t go that high.</div><div></div><div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein</a></div><div>
</div><div>Rod Jay Rosenstein (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English" title="Help:IPA/English" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none !important;">/ˈroʊzənˌstaɪn/</a>;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[2]</a> born January 13, 1965) is an American attorney who served as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Deputy_Attorney_General" title="United States Deputy Attorney General" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">United States Deputy Attorney General</a> from April 26, 2017 to May 11, 2019. Prior to his appointment, he served as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney" title="United States Attorney" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">United States Attorney</a> for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_District_of_Maryland" title="United States District Court for the District of Maryland" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">District of Maryland</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[3]</a> At the time of his confirmation as Deputy Attorney General in April 2017, he was the nation's longest-serving U.S. Attorney.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-4" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[4]</a> Rosenstein had also been nominated to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Fourth_Circuit" title="United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit</a> in 2007, but his nomination was never considered by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate" title="United States Senate" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">U.S. Senate</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-5" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[5]</a></div>President <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump" title="Donald Trump" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Donald Trump</a> nominated Rosenstein to serve as Deputy Attorney General for the United States Department of Justice on February 1, 2017. Rosenstein was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on April 25, 2017. In May 2017, he authored a memo that President Trump cited as the basis for his decision to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_James_Comey" title="Dismissal of James Comey" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">dismiss</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_the_Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation" title="Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">FBI Director</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey" title="James Comey" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">James Comey</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a>Following the recusal of Attorney General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Sessions" title="Jeff Sessions" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jeff Sessions</a> and Comey's dismissal, Rosenstein appointed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller" title="Robert Mueller" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Robert Mueller</a> as special counsel to investigate alleged <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials" title="Links between Trump associates and Russian officials" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 elections</a> and related matters.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-7" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[7]</a> Rosenstein previously assumed authority over the parallel FBI probe after the recusal of former attorney general Jeff Sessions over misleading remarks he made to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Committee_on_the_Judiciary" title="United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Senate Committee on the Judiciary</a> during his confirmation process. On November 7, 2018, Trump transferred command of this oversight to acting US Attorney General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Whitaker" title="Matthew Whitaker" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Matthew Whitaker</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-cnbcnov7-8" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[8]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-voxnov7-9" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[9]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-theweeknov7-10" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[10]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-hillnov7-11" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[11]</a> It was reported in January 2019 that Rosenstein was expected to resign in the first half of the calendar year.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-12" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[12]</a>Rosenstein submitted his official resignation as Deputy Attorney General on April 29, 2019, taking effect on May 11, 2019.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-resignation-13" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[13]</a><div id="toc" class="toc" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 7px; display: table; zoom: 1;"><input type="checkbox" role="button" id="toctogglecheckbox" class="toctogglecheckbox" style="direction: ltr; position: absolute; opacity: 0; z-index: -1; display: none;" /><div class="toctitle" dir="ltr" style="direction: ltr; text-align: center;" lang="en"><h2 style="background: none; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border: 0px; display: inline; line-height: 1.3;">Contents</h2><label class="toctogglelabel" for="toctogglecheckbox" style="cursor: pointer;" /></div><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Background" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1Background</a><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Early_life_and_family" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1.1Early life and family</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Education_and_clerkship" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1.2Education and clerkship</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Career" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2Career</a><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Early_career" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2.1Early career</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#U.S.Attorney" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2.2U.S. Attorney</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Judicial_nomination" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2.3Judicial nomination</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-8" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Deputy_Attorney_General_of_the_United_States" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3Deputy Attorney General of the United States</a><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-9" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Nomination_and_confirmation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.1Nomination and confirmation</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-10" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Comey_memo" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.2Comey memo</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-11" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Special_counsel_appointment" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.3Special counsel appointment</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-12" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Michael_Cohen_investigation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.4Michael Cohen investigation</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-13" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Impeachment_articles" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.5Impeachment articles</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-14" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#The_New_York_Times_report" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.6The New York Times report</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-15" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Transfer_of_Mueller_oversight_and_issuance_of_report" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.7Transfer of Mueller oversight and issuance of report</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-16" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Departure" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.8Departure</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-17" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Personal_life" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">4Personal life</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-18" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#See_also" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">5See also</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-19" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#References" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">6References</a><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-20" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#Sources" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">6.1Sources</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-21" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#External_links" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">7External links</a></li></ul></div><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Background[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=1&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Background" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Early life and family[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=2&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Early life and family" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Rod J. Rosenstein was born in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia" title="Philadelphia" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Philadelphia</a> on January 13, 1965,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-10things-14" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[14]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-SJQ-15" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[15]</a> to Robert, who ran a small business, and Gerri Rosenstein, a bookkeeper and local school board president. He grew up in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Moreland_Township,Montgomery_County,Pennsylvania" title="Lower Moreland Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Lower Moreland Township, Pennsylvania</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-16" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[16]</a> He has one sister, Dr. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nancy_Messonnier&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Nancy Messonnier (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Nancy Messonnier</a>, director of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Immunization_and_Respiratory_Diseases" title="National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases</a> at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention" title="Centers for Disease Control and Prevention" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-written-17" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[17]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-18" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[18]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Education and clerkship[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=3&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Education and clerkship" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Rosenstein attended the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wharton_School_of_the_University_of_Pennsylvania" title="Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Wharton School</a> of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pennsylvania" title="University of Pennsylvania" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">University of Pennsylvania</a>, where he graduated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_cum_laude" class="mw-redirect" title="Summa cum laude" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">summa cum laude</a> in 1986 with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Science" title="Bachelor of Science" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Bachelor of Science</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics" title="Economics" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">economics</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-wapo-19" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[19]</a>After graduating from Penn, Rosenstein attended <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Law_School" title="Harvard Law School" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harvard Law School</a> where he was an editor of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Law_Review" title="Harvard Law Review" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harvard Law Review</a>. While at Harvard, Rosenstein landed an internship with then acting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_District_of_Massachusetts#U.S.Attorneys" title="United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller" title="Robert Mueller" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Robert Mueller</a>. Rosenstein graduated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cum_laude" class="mw-redirect" title="Cum laude" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">cum laude</a> in 1989 with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Doctor" title="Juris Doctor" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Juris Doctor</a> degree.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-wapo-19" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[19]</a> He then served as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_clerk" title="Law clerk" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">law clerk</a> to Judge <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_H.Ginsburg" title="Douglas H. Ginsburg" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Douglas H. Ginsburg</a> of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_District_of_Columbia_Circuit" title="United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-20" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[20]</a> He was a Wasserstein Fellow at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Law_School" title="Harvard Law School" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harvard Law School</a> in 1997–98.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-21" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[21]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Career[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=4&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Career" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Early career[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=5&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Early career" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3><div class="thumb tright" style="clear: right; float: right; margin: 0.5em 0px 1.3em 1.4em; width: auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="thumbinner" style="min-width: 100px; border: 1px solid rgb(200, 204, 209); padding: 3px; background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 222px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg" class="image" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><img alt="" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg/220px-Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg" decoding="async" class="thumbimage" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg/330px-Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg/440px-Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg 2x" data-file-width="4135" data-file-height="2970" style="border: 1px solid rgb(200, 204, 209); vertical-align: middle; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" width="220" height="158" /></a><div class="thumbcaption" style="border: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; padding: 3px; text-align: left;"><div class="magnify" style="float: right; margin-left: 3px; margin-right: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent), url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" csvg="Csvg" width="width" height="height" viewbox="%220" e="E" cg="Cg" id="%22smallbox%22" fill="%22%23fff%22" stroke="%22%23000%22%3E" cpath="Cpath" d="%22M-1.499" h10.99v7.919h1.509z="h10.99v7.919H1.509z" h5.943v4.904h-5.943z="h5.943v4.904h-5.943z" c="C" g="g" display="display" block="block" text-indent="text-indent" px="px" white-space="white-space" nowrap="nowrap" overflow="overflow" user-select="user-select" none="none" hidden="hidden" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data" /></div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Independent-Counsel-Office-Group.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent), url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" csvg="Csvg" width="width" height="height" viewbox="%220" e="E" cg="Cg" id="%22smallbox%22" fill="%22%23fff%22" stroke="%22%23000%22%3E" cpath="Cpath" d="%22M-1.499" h10.99v7.919h1.509z="h10.99v7.919H1.509z" h5.943v4.904h-5.943z="h5.943v4.904h-5.943z" c="C" g="g" display="display" block="block" text-indent="text-indent" px="px" white-space="white-space" nowrap="nowrap" overflow="overflow" user-select="user-select" none="none" hidden="hidden" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data">Rosenstein during his time working for the Independent Counsel. </a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh" title="Brett Kavanaugh" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Brett Kavanaugh</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Azar" title="Alex Azar" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Alex Azar</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Starr" title="Ken Starr" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Ken Starr</a>are present</div></div></div>After his clerkship, Rosenstein joined the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Justice" title="United States Department of Justice" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Department of Justice</a> through the Attorney General's Honors Program. From 1990 to 1993, he prosecuted public corruption cases as a trial attorney with the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division, the latter of which was led by then Assistant Attorney General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller" title="Robert Mueller" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Robert Mueller</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-wapo-19" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[19]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-sun-22" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[22]</a>During the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Bill_Clinton" title="Presidency of Bill Clinton" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Clinton Administration</a>, Rosenstein served as Counsel to Deputy Attorney General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_B.Heymann" class="mw-redirect" title="Philip B. Heymann" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Philip B. Heymann</a> (1993–1994) and Special Assistant to Criminal Division Assistant Attorney General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Ann_Harris(federal_prosecutor)" title="Jo Ann Harris (federal prosecutor)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jo Ann Harris</a> (1994–1995). Rosenstein then worked in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_the_Independent_Counsel" class="mw-redirect" title="United States Office of the Independent Counsel" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Office of the Independent Counsel</a> under <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Starr" title="Ken Starr" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Ken Starr</a> on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewater_controversy" title="Whitewater controversy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Whitewater investigation</a> into President <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton" title="Bill Clinton" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Bill Clinton</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-NYT22may17-23" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[23]</a> As an Associate Independent Counsel from 1995 to 1997, he was co-counsel in the trial of three defendants who were convicted of fraud, and he supervised the investigation that found no basis for criminal prosecution of White House officials who had obtained FBI background reports.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-wapo-19" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[19]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney" title="United States Attorney" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Attorney</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_A.Battaglia" title="Lynne A. Battaglia" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Lynne A. Battaglia</a> hired Rosenstein as an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney" title="United States Attorney" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Assistant U.S. Attorney</a> for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_District_of_Maryland" title="United States District Court for the District of Maryland" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">District of Maryland</a> in 1997.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-wapo-19" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[19]</a>From 2001 to 2005, Rosenstein served as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Tax Division of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Justice" title="United States Department of Justice" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Department of Justice</a>. He coordinated the tax enforcement activities of the Tax Division, the U.S. Attorneys' Offices and the IRS, and he supervised 90 attorneys and 30 support employees. He oversaw civil litigation and served as the acting head of the Tax Division when Assistant Attorney General Eileen J. O'Connor was unavailable, and he personally briefed and argued civil appeals in several federal appellate courts.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-usao-24" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[24]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">U.S. Attorney[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=6&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: U.S. Attorney" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>President <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W.Bush" title="George W. Bush" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">George W. Bush</a> nominated Rosenstein to serve as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney" title="United States Attorney" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Attorney</a> for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_District_of_Maryland" title="United States District Court for the District of Maryland" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">District of Maryland</a> on May 23, 2005. He took office on July 12, 2005, after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate" title="United States Senate" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">U.S. Senate</a> unanimously confirmed his nomination.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-sun-22" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[22]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-usao-24" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[24]</a>As United States Attorney, he oversaw federal civil and criminal litigation, assisted with federal law enforcement strategies in Maryland, and presented cases in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court" class="mw-redirect" title="United States District Court" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">U.S. District Court</a> and in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Fourth_Circuit" title="United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-usao-24" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[24]</a> During his tenure as U.S. Attorney, Rosenstein successfully prosecuted leaks of classified information, corruption, murders and burglaries, and was "particularly effective taking on corruption within police departments." <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-25" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[25]</a>Rosenstein secured several convictions against prison guards in Baltimore for conspiring with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Guerrilla_Family" title="Black Guerrilla Family" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Black Guerrilla Family</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-NYT22may17-23" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[23]</a> He indicted <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Police_Department" title="Baltimore Police Department" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Baltimore police officers</a> Wayne Jenkins, Momodu Gondo, Evodio Hendrix, Daniel Hersl, Jemell Rayam, Marcus Taylor, and Maurice Ward for racketeering.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-26" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[26]</a> Rosenstein, with the aid of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administration" title="Drug Enforcement Administration" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Drug Enforcement Administration</a>, secured convictions in large scale narcotics cases in the District of Maryland, including the arrest and conviction of Terrell Plummer,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-27" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[27]</a> Richard Christopher Byrd,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-28" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[28]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-29" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[29]</a> and Yasmine Geen Young.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-30" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[30]</a>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney_General" title="United States Attorney General" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Attorney General</a> appointed Rosenstein to serve on the Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys, which evaluates and recommends policies for the Department of Justice. He was vice-chair of the Violent and Organized Crime Subcommittee and a member of the Subcommittees on White Collar Crime, Sentencing Issues and Cyber/Intellectual Property Crime. He also served on the Attorney General's Anti-Gang Coordination Committee.Attorney General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Holder" title="Eric Holder" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Eric Holder</a> appointed Rosenstein to prosecute General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cartwright" title="James Cartwright" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">James Cartwright</a>, a former <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Chairman_of_the_Joint_Chiefs_of_Staff" title="Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff</a>, for leaking to reporters.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-NYT22may17-23" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[23]</a> Cartwright pled guilty, but was later pardoned.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-NYT22may17-23" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[23]</a>Rosenstein served as the U.S. Attorney in Maryland at a time when murders in the state dropped by about a third, which was double the decline at the national level. Robberies and aggravated assaults also fell faster than the national average. According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiruvendran_Vignarajah" title="Thiruvendran Vignarajah" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Thiru Vignarajah</a>, the former deputy attorney general of Maryland, "Collaboration between prosecutors, police, and the community combined with a dogged focus on violent repeat offenders was the anchor of Rosenstein’s approach." Rosenstein regarded the heroin and opioid epidemic as a public health crisis, hired a re-entry specialist to help ex-offenders adjust to life outside of prison, and prosecuted several individual cases of corrupt police officers.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-vox-31" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[31]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Judicial nomination[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=7&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Judicial nomination" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>In 2007, President Bush nominated Rosenstein to a seat on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Fourth_Circuit" title="United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit</a>. Rosenstein was a Maryland resident at the time. Maryland's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party(United_States)" title="Democratic Party (United States)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Democratic</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate" title="United States Senate" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Senators</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Mikulski" title="Barbara Mikulski" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Barbara Mikulski</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Cardin" title="Ben Cardin" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Ben Cardin</a>, blocked Rosenstein's nomination, claiming he did not have strong enough ties to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland" title="Maryland" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Maryland</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-32" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[32]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Deputy Attorney General of the United States[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=8&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Deputy Attorney General of the United States" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Nomination and confirmation[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=9&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Nomination and confirmation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Comey memo[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=10&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Comey memo" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]President Trump nominated Rosenstein to serve as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Deputy_Attorney_General" title="United States Deputy Attorney General" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Deputy Attorney General</a> for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Justice" title="United States Department of Justice" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Department of Justice</a> on February 1, 2017.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-33" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[33]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-wapo-nom-34" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[34]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_dismissal_of_U.S.attorneys" title="2017 dismissal of U.S. attorneys" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">He was one of the 46</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney" title="United States Attorney" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Attorneys</a> ordered on March 10, 2017, to resign by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney_General" class="mw-redirect" title="Attorney General" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Attorney General</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Sessions" title="Jeff Sessions" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jeff Sessions</a>; Trump declined his resignation.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-Abruptly-35" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[35]</a> Rosenstein was confirmed by the Senate on April 25, 2017, by a vote of 94–6.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-36" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[36]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-37" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[37]</a><div role="note" class="hatnote navigation-not-searchable" style="font-style: italic; padding-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
See also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_James_Comey" title="Dismissal of James Comey" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Dismissal of James Comey</a></div>On May 8, 2017, President Trump directed Sessions and Rosenstein to make a case against FBI Director <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey" title="James Comey" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">James Comey</a> in writing. The next day, Rosenstein handed a memo to Sessions providing the basis for Sessions's recommendation to President Trump that Comey be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey#Dismissal" title="James Comey" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">dismissed</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-38" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[38]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-39" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[39]</a> In his memo Rosenstein asserts that the FBI must have "a Director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them". He ends with an argument against keeping Comey as FBI director, on the grounds that he was given an opportunity to "admit his errors" but that there is no hope that he will "implement the necessary corrective actions."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-40" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[40]</a>Some critics argued that Rosenstein, in enabling the dismissal of Comey amid an investigation into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections" title="Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">Russian election interference</a>, damaged his own reputation.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-41" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[41]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-42" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[42]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-43" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[43]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-44" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[44]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-45" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[45]</a>After administration officials cited Rosenstein's memo as the main reason for Comey's dismissal, an anonymous source in the White House said that Rosenstein threatened to resign.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-:1-46" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[46]</a> Rosenstein denied the claim and said he was "not quitting," when asked directly by a reporter from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group" title="Sinclair Broadcast Group" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">Sinclair Broadcast Group</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-47" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[47]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-48" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[48]</a>On May 17, Rosenstein told the full Senate he knew that Comey would be fired before he wrote his controversial memo that the White House initially used as justification for President Trump firing Comey.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-49" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[49]</a><h3 style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Special counsel appointment<span class="mw-editsection" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; white-space: nowrap; unicode-bidi: isolate;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=11&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Special counsel appointment" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>On May 17, 2017 Rosenstein appointed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller" title="Robert Mueller" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Robert Mueller</a> as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_prosecutor" title="Special prosecutor" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">special counsel</a> to conduct the investigation into "any links and/or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections" title="Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">coordination between the Russian government</a> and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump" as well as any matters arising directly from that investigation.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-NYT18may17-50" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[50]</a> Rosenstein's order authorizes Mueller to bring criminal charges in the event that he discovers any federal crimes.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-NYT18may17-50" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[50]</a> Rosenstein said in a statement, "My decision is not a finding that crimes have been committed or that any prosecution is warranted. I have made no such determination. What I have determined is that based upon the unique circumstances the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-51" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[51]</a>In an interview with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press" title="Associated Press" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Associated Press</a>, Rosenstein said he would recuse from supervision of Mueller, if he himself were to become a subject in the investigation due to his role in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_James_Comey" title="Dismissal of James Comey" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">dismissal of James Comey</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-52" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[52]</a> Under that scenario, supervision would have fallen to DOJ's third-ranking official, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Associate_Attorney_General" title="United States Associate Attorney General" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Associate Attorney General</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Brand" title="Rachel Brand" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Rachel Brand</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-obscure17-53" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[53]</a> Rachel Brand resigned on February 20, 2018,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-obscure18-54" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[54]</a> leaving the responsibility to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Panuccio" title="Jesse Panuccio" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jesse Panuccio</a>.<h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Michael Cohen investigation[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=12&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Michael Cohen investigation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>In April 2018, Rosenstein reportedly personally approved the FBI raid on President Trump's attorney, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cohen(lawyer)" title="Michael Cohen (lawyer)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Michael Cohen</a>, in which the FBI seized emails, tax documents and records, some of them related to Cohen's payment to adult-film star <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels" title="Stormy Daniels" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Stormy Daniels</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-55" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[55]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-56" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[56]</a> After <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_interim" title="Ad interim" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">ad interim</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.Attorney" class="mw-redirect" title="U.S. Attorney" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">U.S. Attorney</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Berman" title="Geoffrey Berman" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Geoffrey Berman</a> had recused himself, the search was executed by others in the office of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.Attorney_for_the_Southern_District_of_New_York" class="mw-redirect" title="U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York</a> and approved by a federal judge.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-57" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[57]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Impeachment articles[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=13&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Impeachment articles" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Eleven House GOP members filed articles of impeachment against Rosenstein on July 25, 2018, alleging he has stonewalled document requests from Congress and he mishandled the 2016 election investigation. Rosenstein has denied the allegations.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-:0-58" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[58]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-59" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[59]</a> No such impeachment was brought to the floor, with Ryan and Meadows backing down.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-60" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[60]</a> Subsequently, it was revealed that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devin_Nunes" title="Devin Nunes" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Devin Nunes</a> wanted to impeach Rosenstein, but was concerned that attempting to do so would delay the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-61" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[61]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">The New York Times report[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=14&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: The New York Times report" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>On September 21, 2018, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times" title="The New York Times" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">The New York Times</a> reported that Rosenstein suggested, in the spring of 2017 shortly after the dismissal of Comey, that he could secretly tape conversations between himself and Trump, using those recordings against Trump. He also allegedly suggested invoking the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution" title="Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">25th amendment</a> to attempt to remove Trump from office.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-62" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[62]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-63" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[63]</a> Rosenstein strongly denied it, and other reporting suggested he had been sarcastic in his reference to taping Trump.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-64" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[64]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-65" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[65]</a> The report gave rise to rumors that he would be fired.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-66" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[66]</a>Former deputy FBI deputy director <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McCabe" title="Andrew McCabe" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Andrew McCabe</a> stated in a February 2019 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes" title="60 Minutes" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">60 Minutes</a> interview that during the days after Comey was fired, "the highest levels of American law enforcement were trying to figure out what to do with the president," including the possibility of invoking the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25th_Amendment" class="mw-redirect" title="25th Amendment" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">25th Amendment</a> to have Trump removed from office. Rosenstein again denied such discussions occurred.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-67" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[67]</a>Rosenstein went to the White House on September 24, where he met with Chief of Staff John Kelly; according to some reports, he offered his resignation.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-68" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[68]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-69" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[69]</a> Following the meeting, the White House issued a statement that Rosenstein retained his position as Deputy Attorney General and would meet with Trump on September 27.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-70" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[70]</a> Due to the ongoing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh_Supreme_Court_nomination" title="Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">hearings of Brett Kavanaugh</a>, Rosenstein met with Trump on October 8; Rosenstein would not be fired afterwards.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-71" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[71]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-72" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[72]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-73" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[73]</a> Further, Rosenstein agreed to meet with House Republicans within the next two weeks.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-74" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[74]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-75" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[75]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Transfer of Mueller oversight and issuance of report[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=15&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Transfer of Mueller oversight and issuance of report" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>On November 7, 2018, Trump named <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Whitaker" title="Matthew Whitaker" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Matthew Whitaker</a> as Acting Attorney General, and Whitaker took over the oversight of Mueller's investigation. Oversight of the investigation was later assumed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr" title="William Barr" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">William Barr</a> upon his confirmation as Attorney General.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-cnbcnov7-8" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[8]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-voxnov7-9" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[9]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-theweeknov7-10" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[10]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-hillnov7-11" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[11]</a>On March 22, 2019 Mueller released his report to Attorney General Barr. On March 24 Barr sent a four-page letter to Congressional leaders "summarizing" the Mueller report, although he later said he had not intended the letter as a summary.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-76" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[76]</a> In it he said that Mueller had made no determination about whether Trump had committed obstruction of justice, and that Barr and Rosenstein had concluded that the evidence in the report was "not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-77" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[77]</a>In an address at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Club" class="mw-redirect" title="Yale Club" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Yale Club</a> as he was preparing to leave the Justice Department following the release of the Mueller Report, Rosenstein criticized the Obama administration, the FBI, Congress, and the press for their conduct regarding <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections" title="Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections</a>. Rosenstein asserted, “The previous administration chose not to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America,” without noting that in 2016 Republican leaders declined to join the Obama administration in publicly condemning the Russian activities.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-78" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[78]</a> He asserted that former FBI director <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey" title="James Comey" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">James Comey</a> had stated that Trump pressured him to end the investigation into the matter, although Comey had stated Trump asked him to end only the investigation into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn" title="Michael Flynn" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Michael Flynn</a>. Rosenstein went on to say, "In politics — as in journalism — the rules of evidence do not apply,” although the summary of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_Report" title="Mueller Report" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Mueller Report</a> he wrote with attorney general <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr" title="William Barr" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">William Barr</a> was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_Report#Analysis" title="Mueller Report" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">roundly criticized for including misrepresentations</a>. He praised President Trump for his respect for the rule of law, He also criticized the FBI and Congress for leaks regarding the investigation.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-79" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[79]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Departure[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=16&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Departure" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Rosenstein was expected to step down from his position in mid-March.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-80" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[80]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-81" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[81]</a> On February 19, 2019, President Trump announced his intention to nominate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_A.Rosen" title="Jeffrey A. Rosen" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jeffrey A. Rosen</a> for the position of Deputy Attorney General.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-82" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[82]</a>Rosenstein submitted his official resignation as Deputy Attorney General on April 29, 2019, to take effect on May 11, 2019.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-resignation-13" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[13]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Personal life[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rod_Rosenstein&action=edit&section=17&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Personal life" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>Rosenstein is married to Lisa Barsoomian, an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_American" class="mw-redirect" title="Armenian American" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Armenian American</a> lawyer who worked for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Health" title="National Institutes of Health" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">National Institutes of Health</a> until 2011. They have two daughters.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-83" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[83]</a> During her 24 years of law practice, as a government attorney Barsoomian has defended cases for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton" title="Bill Clinton" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Bill Clinton</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell" title="Colin Powell" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Colin Powell</a>, various <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act(United_States)" title="Freedom of Information Act (United States)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Freedom of Information Act</a> (FOIA) cases, and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation" title="Federal Bureau of Investigation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">FBI</a>'s "Carnivore" surveillance system, which monitors and captures e-mail.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-84" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[84]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-85" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[85]</a>Rosenstein is a registered <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party(United_States)" title="Republican Party (United States)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Republican</a>,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-86" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[86]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-87" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[87]</a> "but he has made no campaign donations to any political candidates, according to election records".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-eptoday-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[1]</a>Rosenstein has served as an adjunct professor, teaching classes on federal criminal prosecution at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Maryland_School_of_Law" title="University of Maryland School of Law" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">University of Maryland School of Law</a> and trial advocacy at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Baltimore_School_of_Law" title="University of Baltimore School of Law" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">University of Baltimore School of Law</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-10things-14" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[14]</a>He was a member of Washington D.C.'s Temple Sinai, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Judaism" title="Reform Judaism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Reform Jewish</a> congregation, from 2008 to 2014.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-timesofisrael1-88" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[88]</a> According to a questionnaire that Rosenstein completed ahead of a hearing with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Judiciary_Committee" class="mw-redirect" title="Senate Judiciary Committee" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Senate Judiciary Committee</a>, he was a member of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Community_Center" title="Jewish Community Center" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jewish Community Center</a>'s sports league from 1993 to 2012.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-timesofisrael1-88" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[88]</a> Rosenstein served on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors" title="Board of directors" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">board of directors</a> of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Holocaust_Memorial_Museum" title="United States Holocaust Memorial Museum" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum</a> from 2001 to 2011.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-timesofisrael1-88" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[88]</a>Rosenstein lives in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda,_Maryland" title="Bethesda, Maryland" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Bethesda, Maryland</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Rosenstein#cite_note-89" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[89]</a><div></div>