Trump meets No. 2 DOJ official as aides seek to defuse tensions
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thursday in an encounter that the president’s advisers hoped would cool tensions over a federal investigation into possible ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.
Rosenstein came to the White House to assure Trump that the Justice Department was cooperating with Republican congressional investigators examining the origin of the FBI’s inquiry into ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian operatives, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Yet the brief meeting at the White House on Thursday afternoon appeared not to defuse the president’s anger over Rosenstein’s approval of an FBI search of Trump’s personal attorney’s office and home in New York, one of the people said.
The encounter came a day after Trump had discussed with White House aides the idea of firing Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, one person said. Congressional Republicans have been fueling Trump’s frustration, calling him repeatedly in recent days to complain about the Justice Department’s handling of their requests for classified documents.
Trump seemed distracted as he met with Rosenstein, said one person briefed on the meeting. White House General Counsel Don McGahn, FBI general counsel Dana Boente and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly also attended.
Egged on by some of his strongest supporters, Trump has taken an increasingly combative posture toward Mueller’s investigation after FBI agents raided the home and office of his lawyer Michael Cohen on Monday. But Trump, in a Twitter post on Thursday, denied a report that he tried to dismiss Mueller last year.
“If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him,” Trump said. “Just more Fake News from a biased newspaper!”
The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York was responsible for the search of Cohen’s offices rather than Mueller, though the raid stemmed from evidence the special counsel’s prosecutors referred to the Southern District. Rosenstein approved the search of the law office, which under Justice Department regulations cannot be conducted without a go-ahead from a top department official.
Justice Department officials were also seeking to ease dissatisfaction on Capital Hill, providing House Intelligence Committee members a fuller view of a highly classified intelligence document that may have kicked off the FBI’s investigation of contacts between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian operatives. House Republicans have threatened to pursue contempt proceedings against Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
A Justice Department official said the committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes; its top Democrat, Adam Schiff; and other members of the panel had been granted access to the requested document with minimal redactions. The official said the only information that remains concealed is the identity of a foreign government and the agent that provided some of the information.
Nunes, a California Republican, had previously asserted the department was withholding too much of that document by providing only a heavily redacted version in response to an Aug. 24, 2017, subpoena.