The Calls Are Coming From Inside the (White) House

Rupert Murdoch, Jared Kushner, and friends in a less stressful period, at the Met Museum Costume Institute gala, 2011. Photo by Joe Fornabaio/New York Times. 

Smoking hot takes on the Rosenstein ruckus reported by Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt in the New York Times and Devlin Barrett and Mark Zapotosky in the Washington Post shortly afterwards; I'll say straight out that I believe the WaPo story does much better service to the story and the readers in its treatment, in the first place in the way the Times makes the lede about a particular individual and his surprising language and emotions

WASHINGTON — The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit.

The extreme suggestions show Mr. Rosenstein’s state of mind in the disorienting days that followed Mr. Comey’s dismissal. Sitting in on Mr. Trump’s interviews with prospective F.B.I. directors and facing attacks for his own role in Mr. Comey’s firing, Mr. Rosenstein had an up-close view of the tumult. Mr. Rosenstein appeared conflicted, regretful and emotional, according to people who spoke with him at the time. 

and the Post about the institutions of government responding to a moment of crisis through its principal documentary source:

Memos written by Andrew McCabe, then the acting FBI director, say deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein suggested he secretly record his talks with President Trump, and that Rosenstein discussed possibly trying to remove him from office, according to people familiar with the matter.

The account, first reported by the New York Times, paints Rosenstein as so concerned in May 2017 in the wake of Trump’s firing of then-FBI director James B. Comey that he contemplated secretly recording conversations with the president. He also initiated discussions about invoking the 25th amendment...

McCabe’s lawyer, Michael Bromwich, said in a statement that his client “drafted memos to memorialize significant discussions he had with high level officials and preserved them so he would have an accurate, contemporaneous record of those discussions. When he was interviewed by the special counsel more than a year ago, he gave all of his memos — classified and unclassified — to the special counsel’s office. A set of those memos remained at the FBI at the time of his departure in late January 2018. He has no knowledge of how any member of the media obtained those memos.”

And McCabe's perception of the state of things at the time. It's not clear to me that any of the journalists have seen McCabe's memos themselves, as opposed to hearing them described, but WaPo allows the story to flow from them, and locates the particular words inside one particular meeting, a few days after the firing of James Comey got McCabe this unexpected temporary promotion, which seems to have involved important figures at the Department of Justice and FBI (including legal officer Lisa Page, remember her? but not Sessions), and gives a better placement to the hypothesis that Rosenstein could have been being sarcastic when he proposed wearing a wire to meetings with the Emperor.

Which I want to say I mostly believe, the whole story in fact—that professionals in the organization were in real shock after Comey was fired  (and as Marcy reminds us Trump's bizarre Oval Office session with Lavrov and Kislyak, open to the Russian press but not ours), and asking if desperate measures were in order, but also joking darkly, and the Rosenstein in particular, who had been tricked into providing ammunition for the firing (his memo attacking Comey for his mishandling of the Clinton email investigation, which was perhaps the most important factor in Trump's victory, though it's most likely that nobody managed to tell Trump that was why he was supposedly getting rid of him, which is why Trump ended up spilling the beans on NBC that he'd fired him in the hope of killing the Russia investigation).

And I still don't think it would necessarily have been such a terrible thing if they'd taken some slightly desperate measures, though I guess Trump wouldn't have liked as much as I imagined he would to have the burden taken from his shoulders (his vanity is greater than I can even conceive of, and though he hates every minute of this presidency he'll never give it up voluntarily). You can keep telling me how an attempt to overthrow the elected president would have been a terrible violation of constitutional norms, but would it have been worse than the ones we're still seeing going on every day? Sometimes, speaking just for myself, I honestly think it wouldn't hurt to have a De Gaulle come by, take control, and get the damned Constitution rewritten, as it clearly needs to be—every once in a while a genuine coup d'état accomplishes something.

Anyway, the Times story appears to have shown up online half an hour or so after Trump's new man from Fox News, serving as the White House's deputy chief of staff for communications, made a curious announcement as reported by Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair:

Hearing Bill Shine rolling out media plan to build public support for Trump to fire Rosenstein

— Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) September 21, 2018

Wut? Shine's announcing to the media that he plans to propagandize against the deputy attorney general to get him fired, and the first salvo in the campaign seems to be leaking this story?

Here are some of my instant thoughts:

• I don't give any credence to the hypothesis thrown out by MSNBC's Matt Miller that McCabe himself, fired back in January, is the principal leaker of his writings (McCabe's spokesperson has strenuously denied it), I'm sure the Special Counsel's office is exactly where he would wish them to be, and even if I didn't regard him as an especially straight arrow, as I do, I wouldn't get what good it would do him to get Rosenstein in trouble and endanger the Mueller investigation, and I think the memos must have come to whoever is leaking them from some FBI rogue;
• I also don't buy the hypothesis that it's Trump's idea—it's not likely that anybody on the staff has told Trump about Rosenstein saying these things, it's the kind of thing he doesn't hear about until someone reports it on Fox, and I think he really hates contemplating the fact that some people regard him as a mentally unbalanced and uninformed fool who's a danger to the country, he'd rather believe the #fakenews media are lying about it, however much he wishes to fire the person in question, and prefers to live with Kelly, for example, than to acknowledge Kelly has called him an idiot; and
• I can't imagine Shine is stupid enough to inform the media ahead of time that this thrilling gossip scandal (as the Times reports it) is intended for propaganda; so

naturally, I think it's aimed at Trump (I think John Aravosis may have been first to come up with this), the #AudienceOfOne, to prod him into firing Rosenstein, by somebody who's even more anxious to stop the Special Counsel than Trump is himself.

Like Jared Kushner, whose criminal exposure we keep forgetting about, though we're always learning more. And who's linked to Shine as part of the Fox/NewsCorp faction, a man who himself talks to Rupert Murdoch all the time, and shares the deep wish of those people that Trump would be not less criminal or less fascist, but just better bred and better dressed and not offending his classy friends all the time. And who's always said to have been the most anxious to fire Comey and stop the Russia investigation in the first place. Why should he have learned that was a bad idea? His fatal lack of a peripheral vision makes him pretty nearly as stupid as his father-in-law, but he does have an instinct for intrigue—if the McCabe memos were coming to light around the White House for some reason (it'd be funny if they were discovered as a chaotic consequence of the declassification exercise Hannity and Pirro persuaded Trump to order, which now appears to have fizzled, as we see in a report from Murdoch's New York Post—hi, Rupert! and more usefully BooMan), you can imagine him thinking of some such sneaky, but unwise, use for them.

So there's a hypothesis if you want. If I'm right I'll bet Rosenstein doesn't even get fired. I want to find out what everybody else is saying, though, I'll be back.