White House grapples with another crisis
KAVANAUGH AND ROSENSTEIN ADD TO TRUMP’S FRUSTRATIONS
Antsy and impatient, President Donald Trump called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Saturday with an unmistakable message: Call the vote on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and call it soon, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
Trump has been simmering with frustration over what one senior White House official dubbed the “molasses-like” pace of Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the Senate, where the president has also long blamed Republican leaders with slow-walking his border wall and other key agenda items.
Despite their projections of unity, Trump and his aides behind the scenes see Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, Republican from Iowa, as having been too accommodating to Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor who has alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted ■ her when he was 17, by delaying her hearing until Thursday.
‘Too easily manipulated’
The president has said that Republicans are too easily manipulated by Democrats, that he is sick of Ford’s attorneys getting their way and that he does not believe her accusations are credible, according to a Republican briefed on Trump’s private comments.
Trump told Kavanaugh in a call Monday that he remained behind him and wished him luck in an interview scheduled later in the day with Fox News, a senior White House official said.
The White House found ■ itself grappling on Monday with a second crisis as well — the uncertain job status of Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and is a frequent target of the president’s ire. Rosenstein is expected to meet tomorrow with Trump, and it remains unclear whether he intends to resign, will be fired or will remain in his post.
The two hours and 10 minutes between the first report that Rosenstein had verbally offered to resign and the official White House statement that he was still on the job was a period of confusion in the West Wing.