Sessions continued his trip in Alabama, but Isgur Flores rushed to catch a commercial flight back to Washington to help Rosenstein navigate the storm. Ed O’Callaghan, who had been traveling overseas, cut his vacation short and returned home right away. On Saturday, the president called Kelly with instructions: fire Rosenstein this weekend. Kelly argued against basing a decision on a New York Times article alone. The chief of staff had doubts about the story and at least wanted to hear from Rosenstein. “We gotta let him come in and talk to him,” Kelly told the president. Trump, Kelly, Rosenstein, and Don McGahn traded calls over the weekend. The president vented his anger. McGahn mostly focused on how this could interfere with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Rosenstein was trying to convince Kelly he should keep his job.
Kelly had found himself in this difficult place more than once with a high-level government appointee. As the president would fume and rail about an appointee and threaten at varying decibels that he was going to give him or her the boot, Kelly would see the writing on the wall and try to ease the public servant out gently. “Go,” Kelly would tell someone who had gotten on Trump’s bad side. “It’s not going to get any better.”
Kelly tried this with Rosenstein. But the deputy attorney general didn’t want to leave and argued over the weekend that the Times reporting was misleading and, in his estimation, bore the fingerprints of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.
Aides at the Justice Department and at the White House nevertheless prepared for the deputy attorney general’s ouster. Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s chief of staff who was close to the White House and had been an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation before joining the administration, told Isgur Flores, “Rod will be gone. I’ll be DAG. The president told me this.” When Rosenstein caught wind of the Whitaker plan, he worried it might appear to outsiders like an effort by the president to interfere with the Mueller probe.
On Monday morning, September 24, Rosenstein showed up at his Justice Department office knowing it might be his last day there. Isgur Flores popped into Noel Francisco’s office and said, “Today might be the day. Hope you’re ready to go.” Francisco, the solicitor general, was slated to take over control of the Mueller investigation should Rosenstein exit.
Rosenstein was still upset about the Times story and angry about the rumors that he was being pushed out immediately and replaced by Whitaker. But he also had a strange calm after the harried weekend: he now assumed he’d lose his job and was solely focused on making sure he had a dignified exit. He didn’t want to be tweet-shamed out of his office. Rosenstein had adopted a gallows humor over the months of attacks from Trump’s GOP allies, who often predicted his demise and were proven wrong. In Rosenstein’s tight circle, there was a running joke in the office about his nine lives: “Die another day.”
Isgur Flores got inquiries from reporters that morning about Rosenstein’s resignation. She assumed the tips were coming from the White House, and she took the queries as a sign that Rosenstein’s hours were numbered. Then Axios reported that Rosenstein had “verbally resigned” to Kelly. Isgur Flores tracked down Rosenstein, who was in his office taking goodbye photos with his staff. “Sir, we’re out of time,” she told him.
“Wait, let’s take a picture first,” Rosenstein told his trusted spokeswoman.
“Sir, I need to talk to you immediately,” Isgur Flores said. “It’s happening.”
Rosenstein then went to the White House in late morning, where he expected to be fired. Isgur Flores put the finishing touches on a Justice Department statement announcing Rosenstein’s departure, Whitaker’s appointment as deputy attorney general, and Francisco’s role overseeing the Mueller investigation.
Inside the West Wing, Rosenstein met with Kelly and made clear he was no longer resisting. He said he would resign; he just didn’t want an ignominious, abrupt ending. “If you want me to resign, I’ll be happy to talk to the president and we can negotiate a reasonable amount of time,” Rosenstein said. “I don’t intend to resign immediately.” Kelly didn’t demand anything, but listened instead.
Rosenstein then went to meet with McGahn, who was about to head over to the Hill for the Kavanaugh hearings. In the early afternoon, just after Rosenstein left a National Security Council meeting, he talked by phone with Trump, who was in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly. The call was cordial, even friendly, with Rosenstein saying that the Times story was wrong.
“I don’t want to fire you,” Trump told Rosenstein. “Where did you get that idea?”
Trump suggested Rosenstein visit him later that week at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he told the president. “I’ll talk to you when you come back to town.”
They decided to meet that Thursday. Despite the pleasantries of the call, Rosenstein still thought, “I’ll be fired soon, just not today.” Rosenstein became the latest senior government official left hanging in one of Trump’s parlor games. “I think it pleases him to sort of paw at a wounded mouse in front of him because it asserts his sense of control and authority, and he enjoys that to no end,” Trump’s biographer Tim O’Brien told The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker.
Both behind the scenes and in public, some of Trump’s most important advisers were telling him not to fire Rosenstein. The Friday night after the Times’ “wire” story broke, Sean Hannity said to his loyal viewers, including Viewer No. 1: “I have a message for the president tonight. Under zero circumstances should the president fire anybody.” Hannity, who spoke with Trump nearly every day, warned on air that the president’s enemies were “hoping and praying” that Trump fired Rosenstein to lure him into a scandal. “The president needs to know it is all a setup,” Hannity said.
Some of Trump’s attorneys were also throwing up cautions. Firing Rosenstein would only make it appear he was interfering with the probe once again. Before Trump’s planned meeting with Rosenstein on Thursday, the threat of his ouster seemingly vanished, without so much as an acknowledgment from Trump that he had been demanding it.
Trump and Rosenstein spoke several more times on the phone that week. They met in person the following week, aboard Air Force One on October 8 for a day trip to Florida, and had a perfectly cordial conversation about a range of other topics. They were, in the acronym used by one Trump adviser who interacted with them on the flight, “BFFs.” Best friends forever.
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In mid-September, Trump confronted a political crisis over Kavanaugh’s embattled Supreme Court nomination. The #MeToo reckoning had arrived at the doorstep of the White House. Christine Blasey Ford alleged, first in a private letter to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and then in an on-the-record interview published September 16 in The Washington Post, that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in 1982, when the two of them had been high school students in suburban Maryland. Ford told the Post reporter Emma Brown that Kavanaugh corralled her into a bedroom during a house party, pinned her to a bed, groped her, pressed his body against hers, and, when she tried to scream, put his hand over her mouth to silence her. Kavanaugh denied the allegation.