So much for the Rod Rosenstein saga

| 8:00 pm EDT October 8, 2018
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Awhile back, a dubious and quickly discredited report claimed that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had tried to invoke the 25th Amendment against Donald Trump, and had offered to wear a wire while meeting with him. That false story then led to another false story that Rosenstein had resigned, followed by yet another story that Rosenstein was about to be fired, sending everyone into a panic. After all, Rosenstein has jurisdiction over the Trump-Russia investigation.

Trump quickly seized on the false reporting by announcing that he would be meeting with Rod Rosenstein to determine his fate on the same day that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford would be testifying before Congress. Then even Trump seemed to realize that this was too on-the-nose, and he announced that the meeting would be pushed back a week. By this time it was clear that Trump wasn’t going to fire Rosenstein, and had never seriously been considering it. Sure enough, Trump quietly announced to reporters today that he will not be firing Rosenstein.

We still don’t know who planted this series of false stories about Rod Rosenstein, or precisely why. The initial presumption was that Donald Trump and his team planted it, as an attempted distraction from the scandalous Brett Kavanaugh hearings. But that took a strange turn when Trump’s close confidant Sean Hannity went on air and all but begged Trump not to do it. Considering that the far-right House GOP “Freedom Caucus” immediately seized the opportunity to try to haul in Rosenstein for more grandstanding hearings, perhaps the leaks were orchestrated by their camp.

In any case, the Rod Rosenstein drama is finally over – at least until the next time Donald Trump needs to create a distraction. There is, however, an important upshot here: Trump has once again signaled that he doesn’t have the political muscle to get away with firing Rosenstein and he knows it. Otherwise he’d have done it by now.