What was already setting up to be one of the biggest, most consequential weeks of Trump’s presidency—as the commander-in-chief, in New York, chaired a meeting of the United Nations and, in Washington, the city braced for a showdown over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—saw the stakes appear to rise to historic levels by noon Monday, as news outlets raced to report the long anticipated denouement of deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.
It was not to be. But the momentary firing-that-wasn’t likely marks the postponement of an impending crisis, rather than a permanent escape.
The demise of Rod Rosenstein—the man who in his first weeks in office helped justify the firing of FBI Director James Comey and then appointed Comey’s predecessor, Robert Mueller, to be the special counsel leading the investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election—appeared to happen as Ernest Hemingway once said about going bankrupt: Gradually, then suddenly.
Gradually, because ultimately, it has never seemed a question of if Rosenstein would be fired, but when—and how far along Mueller would be by the time Rosenstein was canned. Reporters across the capital had prewritten “Rosenstein is fired” stories numerous times, as the tensions between the White House and the Justice Department ebbed and flowed over the last two years. (Most recently, the Wall Street Journal had actually sung the praises[1] of the Trump-Rosenstein dynamic: “It’s fantastic,” President Trump said of their relationship in August.)
The life expectancy of the Mueller investigation status quo perhaps already numbers mere weeks.
And suddenly, because last Friday, The New York Times reported[2] that Rosenstein had—in those same tumultuous weeks last year following Comey’s firing—discussed possibly invoking the 25th Amendment and rousting Cabinet officials to remove Trump from office. Ironically, the article explained