Among his many peers at the Justice Department, there was deep concern that Rosenstein had crossed a dangerous line. “There were only two possible interpretations you could take from what he did,” one department veteran said. “Either he knowingly helped the president fire the FBI director to try to rid himself of this investigation, or Rod was an unwitting tool who got used by the president. Both of them were terrible.”
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On May 10, a sense of panic took hold at the FBI headquarters, the hulking Soviet-style J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, and at the Justice Department headquarters across the street. Many wondered if the Russia probe was now in peril. Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, a close ally of Comey’s, overnight became the bureau’s acting director, but he and his colleagues expected he could be removed. “This was a tumultuous time to say the least. It was one, frankly, crazy thing after another,” FBI counsel Jim Baker later recalled in congressional testimony. “The Director being fired because the President doesn’t like the fact that we’re investigating Russia was pretty crazy to my mind.”
The FBI had secretly been considering opening an investigation on Trump for obstructing the Russia probe ever since Comey had returned from a private February 14 meeting with the president in which he referenced the Michael Flynn investigation and said he hoped Comey could “see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Comey had resisted ruling it out in public; he knew one day he might be under investigation. Now some felt Trump’s firing of Comey gave the FBI an urgent reason to investigate. “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting,” the FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok wrote in a text message to the FBI lawyer Lisa Page, a view supported by McCabe.
Also on May 10, in the middle of the tumult following Comey’s firing, Sessions, Rosenstein, and McCabe ended up in the same room, at a farewell party for Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general for the national security division. She was leaving because she feared the Trump administration’s recklessness and detested Sessions, someone she considered a xenophobic misogynist with little respect for the law. Unexpectedly, Rosenstein asked if he could join the list of people making remarks about the Justice Department lifer. He spoke of McCord’s impeccable reputation for putting her duty to the public above politics. In praising her, he tried to remind people who he was and what he valued at a time when many had palpable doubts.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike were expressing serious concerns, with some comparing Trump’s firing of Comey to President Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. “This is nothing less than Nixonian,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “No one should accept President Trump’s absurd justification that he is now concerned that FBI director Comey treated Secretary Clinton unfairly.”
On May 10, Vice President Pence traveled to the Capitol, and reporters shouted out questions about whether Trump was trying to stop the FBI investigation of Russian interference in the election. “Let me be clear with you, that was not what this is about,” Pence said. The vice president knew more than he was sharing, however. He had been in the Oval Office meeting where Trump explained his plan.
That same day, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov happened to be in town. Trump invited Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak into the Oval Office for a meet and greet. With the Comey story dominating the news, the White House blocked the press pool from observing the session with the Russians. But a photographer with the Russian state-run news agency TASS accompanied the Russian contingent and snapped pictures of the jovial, relaxed U.S. president grinning and shaking hands with the Kremlin envoys, images the Russian Foreign Ministry almost immediately posted on Twitter. Trump boasted to the Russians, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Then the president told them what he considered the most important fact everyone doing business with him should know: “I’m not under investigation.”
On May 11, frustrated that his press team had failed to stem the tide of bad headlines, Trump decided he would be his own spokesman. The president sat down with the NBC anchor Lester Holt and told him that he had been going to fire Comey regardless of Rosenstein’s recommendation. He also acknowledged that the Russia investigation influenced his decision. “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won,’” Trump told Holt.
On May 11, Rosenstein called together the Justice Department’s senior officials overseeing counterintelligence, national security, and criminal cases for a private strategy session. There was rampant speculation in the media that Trump fired Comey in order to torpedo the FBI’s Russia investigation, but Rosenstein told them to keep at it and to leave no stone unturned. “In my capacity as acting attorney general of the United States, I’m instructing you that you should follow every available lead, and if there’s any wrongdoing, you should uncover it,” he said.
Rosenstein asked those assembled if they believed the Justice Department was capable of continuing to run the Russia investigation or if they thought he should consider appointing a special counsel, as McCabe had been urging. Rosenstein seemed inclined to let the Justice Department continue to run the show. Some officials in the room who felt they did need a special counsel later dubbed it Rosenstein’s “CYA meeting,” or cover your ass, figuring he wanted to later be able to say he asked all his top officials and they agreed.
By Friday, May 12, Rosenstein seemed rocked by the stress of the week. He was scheduled to give short remarks at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s green-glass headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, as part of an annual wreath-laying ceremony in honor of personnel who died trying to investigate drug traffickers. He arrived early. He was a jumble of exhaustion and emotion. And his host was one of Comey’s best friends, Chuck Rosenberg, the agency’s acting director and a standout career prosecutor. Like Rosenstein, Rosenberg had come up through the department and been named a U.S. attorney by President Bush.
Rosenberg ushered the deputy attorney general into a nearby office and closed the door. They spoke privately for a few minutes. Rosenstein had some trepidation at seeing Rosenberg, and tried to explain to him that things were more complicated than they appeared and he was sorry he couldn’t say more. The two men walked out, and Rosenstein delivered the remarks he had prepared. He spoke with reverence for the rule of law—that framework of principles that promised impartiality, accountability, transparency, and basic fairness—which Trump was undermining daily.
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McCabe had been pushing Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to safeguard the Russia investigation, but Comey took matters into his own hands. Comey didn’t trust Rosenstein to be independent or aggressive enough in overseeing the probe nor to dig into the president’s efforts to obstruct it. Trump taunted his fired FBI director with a tweet the morning of May 12: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Over that Mother’s Day weekend, Trump’s tweet about “tapes” wormed itself into Comey’s subconscious, and he woke up in the middle of the night on Monday, May 15, and realized he had a weapon he could use: his own version of “tapes.” Comey decided to leak the contemporaneous memo he had written about Trump saying “letting this go” regarding the Flynn investigation, which showed the president trying to interfere with and obstruct a criminal investigation, asking a friend, the Columbia University law professor Dan Richman, to share details of the memo. On May 16, Michael Schmidt of The New York Times published them: “Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation.”