This morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee called Rod Rosenstein to testify about operation “crossfire hurricane,” the Mueller investigation, and related matters. I watched as much of it as I could stomach — a little less than two hours.
Rosenstein is a snake. He recommended that James Comey be fired (albeit for a different reason than the one Trump mentioned in an interview about Comey’s termination) and then made the firing of Comey the grounds for bringing in a special counsel.
Moreover, he selected Robert Mueller for the job even though President Trump had just rejected Mueller for the position of FBI director. Mueller was thus a disappointed office seeker.
Rosenstein gave Mueller a ridiculously broad writ to investigate, and stood by as Mueller hired one Trump-hating Democrat after another to staff his project. And Rosenstein declined to recuse himself even though he was a player in the firing of Comey — an important element of what he asked Mueller to investigate.
Rosenstein was snake-like again this morning. Most of the questions directed at him by Republicans had to do with his rubber stamping of applications to spy on Carter Page — applications that contained lies the Democrats had paid to procure and that were based on Russian disinformation.
Rosenstein told the Committee that he is “accountable” for this outrage, but not “responsible.” Pressed as to what he means by “accountable,” he said, in effect, he means appearing before the Committee to say he’s not responsible.
The Committee Democrats were their usual nauseating selves. They used their time mostly to (1) complain about the fact that the hearing is taking place and (2) bray about how Russia threatens our democracy.
But our democracy is threatened when partisans in the FBI who want to defeat a presidential candidate, and then want to “resist” the elected president, repeatedly lie to a court so they can spy on that candidate’s campaign. And, for all the noise about Russia, it doesn’t matter to Committee Dems that disinformation from Russians was at the heart of the FBI’s lying to the court and to others.
Of course, it doesn’t matter to them. The Russian disinformation was accumulated in a project paid for by Democrats.
The threat to our democracy, if any, posed by (1) the release by Russia of emails that reveal what Democrat operatives really think and (2) some posts dropped into the vast cesspool that is social media, pales in comparison to an effort by the FBI, predicated on Russian disinformation, to spy on and slander a presidential campaign — and later the elected president.
Yet the Democrats say there’s nothing to see here.
There’s plenty to see. However, the Senate Judiciary Committee isn’t the best vehicle for dealing with it.
John Durham is.
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