If Rod Rosenstein laid a trap for Republicans in Congress, one of them just took the bait
Republicans in Congress have spent the past several months trying to get their hands on the contemporaneous memos that former FBI Director James Comey wrote about his interactions with Donald Trump. The FBI refused the request, so it became a matter for the DOJ. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also tried to fend off the request, but ended up caving today. The memos have predictably leaked already – and that may have been Rosenstein’s plan.
Rosenstein decided to provide members of Congress with heavily redacted versions of the memos this evening, and sure enough, those memos were in the hands of the Associated Press and other news outlets almost instantly. This isn’t surprising, as the only reason the Republicans in Congress were seeking the memos was so they could leak them, and then try to spin them in a manner which helps Trump and harms everyone investigating Trump. But because these memos are redacted, they don’t contain much of anything that isn’t already out there. When MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was reading Comey’s memos to her guest James Comey, it became clear just how throughly redacted these memos are.
If a Republican member of Congress is the source behind the leak of these redacted memos, then that person just committed obstruction of justice. Even though the memos are too redacted to do any real harm in the investigation, it’s the intent of the leaker that matters. So it’s entirely possible that Rosenstein was setting a trap by feeding these memos to Congress, in the hope that one or more of them would incriminate themselves by leaking them.
How would Rod Rosenstein prove who leaked what? He’d have had to provided a uniquely coded version of the memos to each member of Congress in order to track which version leaked. There’s no way to know if he did this or not. But if Rosenstein did lay a trap in order to force the GOP Congress to back off, then one or more of them just took the bait. Let’s see where this goes.
