by Dan Bongino
Now here’s the part of the law that offered Rosenstein other options.
§ 600.2 Alternatives available to the Attorney General.
When matters are brought to the attention of the Attorney General that might warrant consideration of appointment of a Special Counsel, the Attorney General may:
(a) Appoint a Special Counsel;
(b) Direct that an initial investigation, consisting of such factual inquiry or legal research as the Attorney General deems appropriate, be conducted in order to better inform the decision; or
(c) Conclude that under the circumstances of the matter, the public interest would not be served by removing the investigation from the normal processes of the Department, and that the appropriate component of the Department should handle the matter. If the Attorney General reaches this conclusion, he or she may direct that appropriate steps be taken to mitigate any conflicts of interest, such as recusal of particular officials.9
So you can see, Rod Rosenstein didn’t have to appoint anybody. He could have said, “Hey, the buck stops here.” He didn’t. Why not? Yes, the pressure was intense. The Comey memo leaks had done just what they were intended to do: increase the aura of suspicion around the president and make the nation doubt his legitimacy.
And although Rosenstein could have counteracted Comey’s assault by telling the FBI to finish up its investigation and issue its findings, he didn’t do that, either. He capitulated to Comey and the Democrats, and yes, even to some Republicans who wanted the Russiagate investigations expanded. Why did he make that choice?
Obviously, as with so much of Russiagate, he was influenced by appearances, by the portrait Comey had created through his testimony and his leaks, which came on top of Sally Yates’s testimony, the leaks on Flynn, and so many other mysterious leaks by Obama loyalists. And, yes, I think he was ticked off at being made the fall guy for ousting Comey. But I think there was something else driving him: loyalty to the FBI and to his old friend Robert Mueller.
The Department of Justice works often in lockstep with the FBI. The bureau does a great deal of the legwork and “gets their man,” as the old expression goes. The DOJ then gets the conviction. As the FBI’s own website describes the relationship: “Within the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI is responsible to the attorney general, and it reports its findings to U.S. Attorneys across the country.”10 So there is a kind of symbiotic relationship between the DOJ and the FBI. They need each other. They are family.
Now the famous FBI had been compromised by atrocious management decisions. Its reputation—which, to this day, is periodically damaged by continuing revelations that former director J. Edgar Hoover spied and conducted hostile operations against U.S. citizens—was hanging in the balance. Its director, Comey, had just been humiliated. And that director, in turn, leaked obstruction-tinged stories to humiliate the president, who was under investigation.
Rod Rosenstein must have received briefings on the Russiagate investigation, which had been officially going on for ten months at this point. He met with McCabe. Presumably, he must have talked to investigators. There’s little chance he wasn’t told about the FISA warrant applications on Carter Page that Comey had signed multiple times. Rosenstein has always been suspiciously cryptic about how much detail he got about Steele, the dossier, Steele’s relationship with Glenn Simpson, and Steele and Simpson’s relationship to Hillary Clinton. He must have been briefed, you’d hope, that interviews with George Papadopoulos had yielded no evidence of collusion, and that they had even produced exculpatory evidence. You’d expect him to meet with Peter Strzok, the head of the FBI counterintelligence investigation at the time. Strzok, as we know now from his texts to Lisa Page (his gal pal and an FBI lawyer), disliked Trump but also thought there was “no there there” when it came to Russiagate. Did he tell that to Rod Rosenstein? Was the brand-new deputy attorney general fed the full story or just half the story? If his top-line briefings just skimmed the surface, if they recounted the crap in the dossier and avoided addressing the potentially compromised relationships that created the dossier—among Simpson, Steele, Clinton, Trubnikov, Surkov, the DNC, and other unnamed sources—then, of course, he would approve a special counsel. He’d be swayed like all the other liberal, mainstream players who saw a harmless spark and shouted “fire,” and who were blinded by their hatred of Trump, his business as unusual agenda, and his campaign remarks.
Rosenstein, as noted, is a company man. He wanted the company to be redeemed. The DOJ needs the FBI. With his boss Jeff Sessions recused from all things Russian, Rosenstein had to make a decision. He wound up buying what the FBI was selling and what the obsessed liberals were yelling.
And he had the perfect man for the job that needed to be done: one of his role models, Robert Mueller.
I’m not kidding. Back in 2005, when he was named Maryland’s newest U.S. attorney, Rosenstein gave an interview to the Maryland Daily Record. He was asked who his role models were. He named only one man. Here’s his full answer:
I’ve been fortunate to have many over the course of my career. One is [Robert Mueller], the head of the FBI. My first job in law enforcement was as an intern in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, when Mueller was the interim U.S. attorney up there. I then came to Washington, and I wound up working in the criminal division of the Justice Department [then headed by Mueller]. He was a career prosecutor, someone who was respected for his legal judgment and who was never thought of as being a partisan prosecutor. It’s really critical that people, when they deal with the U.S. attorney’s office, have a right to expect that they are going to be treated without regard to politics. I think it’s important that we do everything we can to reassure people that that’s going to be the case.11
I’m sure some readers find some of Rosenstein’s words ironic, considering that he, and his choice for special counsel, dragged out a politically tainted investigation for nearly two years. I know I do. But more than that, I also believe Rosenstein. I think he was speaking honestly. As I said, he’s a company guy. A lifetime government lawyer. Rosenstein believes in the institution of government. The Department of Justice was his church. He had devoted his life to it. And Robert Mueller, Rosenstein’s role model, had served two churches: the DOJ and the FBI.
Both departments were understandably under fire from the president of the United States. I believe both men felt that the institutions they believed in were under attack. The president was accusing the FBI of being partisan—the opposite of being impartial, which was the very thing Rosenstein believed was of paramount importance, the thing he believed Robert Mueller personified. Meanwhile, Rosenstein, thanks to the memo he wrote at Trump’s request, was perceived by many in the bureau as being anti-Comey. Hiring Mueller, the former FBI head, to run the investigation as special counsel must have seemed like the best of both worlds. Mueller was a G-man who was a former prosecutor and a Republican. He was upstanding enough to withstand any suggestion of impropriety or bias. You can see how Rosenstein thought Mueller was just the guy to remove any clouds of suspicion engulfing D.C.
CLOUD CONFUSION
There was one problem with those clouds. There was one hanging over the FBI and there was one hanging over the White House. Which was more ominous and threatening to Mueller and Rosenstein?
Rosenstein brought Mueller over to the Oval Office for a meeting with the president and Sessions. It has been reported that this was an interview of sorts, that Trump was considering Mueller as a replacement for Comey. But as I alluded to earlier, I think that wasn’t the case. I think Rosenstein, who was shocked and appalled by Trump’s unapologetic behavior, and who was annoyed about drafting the memo that the president used to justify firing Comey, wanted Mueller to meet with Trump. He knew the buttoned-up, conservative former FBI director would be suspicious.
The next day, Mueller took the job Rosenstein offered. He had no interest in working for the president. He was interested in
working for nobody but Rosenstein and covering for his old stomping grounds. He would investigate the man who had just interviewed him as well as the campaign and the rumors against it. The cloud over the White House wasn’t going anywhere until the cloud over his old house—the J. Edgar Hoover Building, home to the FBI—dissipated.
That, I believe, was the premise of the Mueller investigation, both for Rosenstein and his hero appointee. The initial appointment document lays this out, directly tying Mueller’s future work to the investigation started under Comey.
Appointment of Special Counsel
to Investigate Russian Interference With the
2016 Presidential Election and Related Matters
By virtue of the authority vested in me as Acting Attorney General, including 28 U.S.C. §§ 509, 510, and 515, in order to discharge my responsibility to provide supervision and of the Department of Justice, and to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, I hereby order as follows:
(a) Robert S. Mueller III is appointed to serve as Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice.
(b) The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confirmed by then-FBI Director James B. Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017, including:
(i) any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and
(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).
(c) If the Special Counsel believes it is necessary and appropriate, the Special Counsel is authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters.12
As you can see, the appointment of Mueller doesn’t make even the smallest nod to Trump’s charges of harassment or targeting. From this perspective, there is no cloud over the FBI. It is blue sky all the way. And why not? In a face-off between the Trump campaign and the misinformation campaign, the latter, in conjunction with media allies, had been slaughtering the former. And with Mueller in place, that trend was primed to continue.
But it wasn’t going to be easy.
DREAM TEAM ASSEMBLY
Right away, law and order poster boy Robert Mueller, hailed by so many as the savior of the Republic, began assembling his prosecution dream team. It was like a fantasy-league draft for legal nerds. Actually, make that Clinton-loving legal nerds, because Mueller wound up drafting a team loaded with liberal ringers! I gave you a partial rundown in Chapter 2: at least two avowed Clinton campaign donors, a Sally Yates fanboy, haters of big business, and on and on. Plus, Mueller appointed Peter Strzok as his lead investigator. At this point, Strzok was regarded as the most up-to-date investigator on Russiagate. He headed the counterintelligence investigation for the FBI. As such, he presumably knew the backstory on every footnote, every dotted “i” and every crossed “t” in the FISA warrant application.
He must have seemed like the key player to Mueller. The puzzle master. The spy breaker. Strzok knew all there was to know about the timeline of the probe. He knew about the intel. He knew about Papadopoulos, Page, and Manafort. He even interviewed Mike Flynn in the Oval Office. He knew everyone—including CIA head John Brennan, whom he would reportedly brief.
It’s not clear whether Mueller knew that Strzok was involved in a romantic relationship with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, but he drafted her on to the dream team—I want to write “scheme team”—too. After all, she knew the legal guidelines that the FBI had been operating within, or possibly skirting, to conduct its all-out inquiry.
It took less than two months for Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to go from investigation superstars to black sheep.
The event was the wake-up call Rosenstein should have gotten before he turned to Mueller, and that Mueller should have gotten before he accepted the special counsel gig. But it came too late. The two men controlling the future of Russiagate were now in too deep.
Way over their heads, in fact.
STRZOK’S FATAL ERRORS
On January 11, 2017, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who took the job in 2012 under the Obama administration, began an investigation into misconduct allegations involving FBI director Comey and how he handled the probe of Hillary Clinton’s email practices. The investigation was extremely broad and included sweeps of inter-FBI communications, including email and texts on agency-issued phones.
Among the players Horowitz probed were Peter Strzok, who had been assigned from August 2015 until July 2016 to the FBl’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, and Lisa Page, who was FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe’s special counsel during the same period. Since Comey reopened the Clinton email investigation around October 28, 2016, and closed it on November 6, 2016, the relevant dates overlapped a bit with Strzok’s work investigating allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Lisa Page was involved in as well.
Naturally, Horowitz wanted to see the communications between these major figures in the investigation. However, according to DOJ Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd in a letter, the FBl’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices questionably failed to preserve text messages for Strzok and Page from December 14, 2016, to approximately May 17, 2017. The letter indicates that the collection tool failure was due to “‘misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBl’s collection capabilities.”13
By July 2017, Horowitz’s team had uncovered disturbing texts between Strzok and Page. Eventually, the inspector general’s team would use digital forensic methods to recover almost 20,000 texts—9,311 messages from Strzok’s iPhone and 10,760 from Page’s—from the collection tool “failure” period.14 The content of the messages varies, from the mundane and managerial to the mercenary and maniacal.
We’ve already covered some of their exchanges. And Strzok made national headlines by referring to Trump as an “idiot” and worse. He told Page, “[W]e’ll stop” Trump from being elected, and he also texted: “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk [of Trump’s winning]. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
There are many more shocking exchanges uncovered by the inspector general. The couple also texted with lead DOJ inquisitor Kevin Clinesmith, who was handling the Papadopoulos inquiry for Team Mueller. When Clinesmith joined in on their Trump trashing, texting, “Viva le resistance! [sic]” he found himself off the investigation.15
This is toxic, embarrassing stuff. It makes the FBI investigation into Russiagate look like a targeted political witch hunt, not a professional FBI investigation. And it also, obviously, makes Mueller’s special counsel investigation look awful. Strzok comes off as an unabashed partisan. He represents the exact opposite of what Rod Rosenstein aspired to back in 2005 when he talked about Mueller and about how it was so important that citizens who deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office “have a right to expect that they are going to be treated without regard to politics,” and about how he strives to “do everything we can to reassure people that that’s going to be the case.” So Strzok was transferred back to the FBI and placed in the human resources department. He toiled in oblivion until he was fired on August 10, 2018. Page was also bounced from the Mueller team. She resigned from the FBI on May 4, 2018.
At the time Page and Strzok were banished, the precise reasons were kept under wraps. The Mueller team didn’t release a statement saying they had compromised the integrity of the Trump-Russia investigation, obviously. Instead, Strzok and Page just quietly disappeared. But Mueller and Rosenstein knew it was just a matter of time before word leaked out about their scurrilous, compromising texts. After
months of the FBI foisting bad optics on Trump, the whistle was finally about to be blown on the FBI. The investigation that brought down Comey was now going to be examined anew and the results would likely be damning—if not totally indefensible. One of the lead counterintelligence agents for the FBI:
a. was completely indiscreet about his opinions and the workings of the bureau;
b. was a foul-mouthed, unapologetic Trump hater; and, most damningly,
c. didn’t actually believe there was any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion—“There’s no there,” remember?—which is what the entire special counsel investigation was based on.
Now Mueller and Rosenstein had to make a decision. Had the unmasking of Strzok’s texts and his unconscionable behavior compromised the integrity of the Trump-Russia probe? Was the special counsel a dead man walking because of it?
Evidently, they evaluated the situation and somehow decided they still had a viable witch hunt and didn’t need to wave a white flag. The special counsel was two months into the investigation. It was approaching a full year since the FBI punched its Papadopoulos investigation ticket. They had interviewed him. They had accessed his emails. They knew that he had botched his timeline of events. They also had delved into his past. As Mueller would later reveal in his investigative report, his team examined whether Papadopoulos “acted as an agent of, or at the direction and control of, the government of Israel. While the investigation revealed alleged ties between Papadopoulos and Israel (and search warrants were obtained in part on that basis), the Office ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction under FARA or Section 951.”16
Investigators had eight months to dig into all the allegations made in Christopher Steele’s FBI reports on Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. It was now a race against time for the special counsel. He didn’t really think the DOJ inspector general was going to leak anything. That’s almost antithetical to what an inspector general does—hold the line and enforce the rules. But this was Washington, D.C., a place that, if it were a ship, would sink faster than a lead Titanic thanks to all the backbiters and partisans on both sides of the aisle.
