William Barr and Rod Rosenstein are going to end up sharing a cell
Donald Trump’s newly handpicked Attorney General William Barr has been criminally obstructing justice since he released a phony “summary” of the Mueller report, and perhaps even further back then that. Barr surely knows he’s committing multiple felonies, and it’s unclear if he simply doesn’t care about the consequences, or if he’s banking on a Trump pardon. Either way, we’re now learning that Trump’s longtime Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is no different and no better than Barr.
Today the Washington Post revealed that when Rod Rosenstein’s job was in jeopardy several months back, he managed to keep it by telling Donald Trump that he was on his “team” and that he could “land the plane” in terms of protecting Trump from the Mueller investigation’s findings. This is the textbook definition of obstruction of justice. Rosenstein must have known yesterday that this story was coming out, as he gave a deranged speech in which he praised Trump’s honesty, blamed the Trump-Russia scandal on President Obama, and attacked the media.
Throughout the Mueller probe, we tried to give Rod Rosenstein some benefit of the doubt, if only because it appeared Mueller’s investigation wasn’t being screwed with. But the Mueller report reveals that Mueller only investigated a fraction of what was already publicly known about the Trump-Russia scandal, and didn’t probe Trump’s finances in order to figure out the financial component of the Trump-Russia election conspiracy. This all strongly suggests that Rosenstein crippled the Mueller probe, in order to protect Trump from his crimes.
We have no way of knowing if Rod Rosenstein was always corrupt, or if Donald Trump has found some way to threaten or blackmail Rosenstein into doing the wrong thing. Either way, Rosenstein’s behavior constitutes felony obstruction of justice. There is no way that the Department of Justice will prosecute Rosenstein for criminally conspiring with Trump and Barr, as long as Trump and Barr are in power. But the minute Trump is gone from office, Rosenstein and Barr both need to be prosecuted for obstruction. Let a judge and jury sort out how long they should go to prison for. But as far as justice is concerned, the two can share a cell.
