Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told peers that he was angry over how President Trump used him to justify firing former FBI Director James Comey last year, The New York Times reported Friday.
Rosenstein has repeatedly confided to colleagues that the scandal damaged his reputation, according to four people familiar with the issue.
Publicly, the top Justice Department official has repeatedly defended the letter he penned condemning Comey’s job performance. But, internally, Rosenstein appeared conflicted on the matter, the Times reported.
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Sources told the Times that Rosenstein believed Trump had manipulated him and his letter, which criticized the FBI’s handling of the 2016 investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, in order to rationalize Comey’s firing.
He reportedly appeared “shaken,” “unsteady,” and “overwhelmed,” in the weeks following Comey’s abrupt dismissal.
Rosenstein had been sworn in as deputy attorney general two weeks before Comey was ousted.
One person told the Times that Rosenstein sounded “frantic, nervous, upset and emotionally dis-regulated” around that time.
Andrew White, a former federal prosecutor who is close with Rosenstein, said his fury was justified.
“The White House put Greyhound tire tracks on his back,” White said. “They threw him under the bus.”
Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, discredited claims that Rosenstein was upset.
If Rosenstein was angry, Flores said, it was because then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe had hidden the existence of memos Comey wrote to himself about his interactions with Trump.
“To be clear, he was upset not because knowledge of the existence of the memos would have changed the [Deputy Attorney General’s] decision regarding Mr. Comey, but that Mr. McCabe chose not to tell him about their existence until only hours before someone shared them with The New York Times,” Flores said.
Rosenstein and FBI Director Christoper Wray faced the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday for a tense five-hour hearing amid rising tensions between the Justice Department and allies of President Trump on Capitol Hill.
The pair insisted that they are neither “angry” nor Democrats when they were questioned about their integrity.