How do you get a liberal paper to staunchly defend the Justice Department? Just put President Trump on the other side. New York Times reporter Nicholas Fandos was the latest media figure to stand up for deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein against Republican attacks in a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.
Fandos’s Friday piece took every Rosenstein rebuttal as some kind of clear refutation of Republican charges of investigatory malfeasance in “Tug of War Intensifies On Access To Inquiry.”
For months, their sparring had been indirect, stern letters exchanged, pointed threats traded through the news media. But on Thursday, the ever-intensifying skirmishes between Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and conservative House Republicans broke into an ugly public fight.
On the House floor, Republicans voted in lock step to give the Justice Department seven days to produce sensitive documents related to the Russia inquiry and the F.B.I.’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email use. Though nonbinding, the measure was intended to put Mr. Rosenstein on notice that House lawmakers were willing to take punitive action -- potentially including impeachment -- if their demands were not met.
In the House Judiciary Committee, conservative Republicans hauled Mr. Rosenstein and the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, before television cameras to accuse them of hiding information from Congress to protect their own interests. In Mr. Rosenstein’s case, some Republicans charged outright misconduct related to the investigation into Russian election interference.
The Times, Fandos included, has avidly protected special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections from sharp and substantive Republican criticism of partisanship (Fandos actually called it an “attack on law enforcement” in a December 2017 article).
Democrats accused Republicans of concocting a political distraction to further bloody the reputation of the Justice Department as it investigates President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Judiciary Committee Democrat, called the floor vote “clearly a pretext for a move against Mr. Rosenstein that the majority already has planned.”
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Fandos portrayed Rosenstein as a put-upon victim of a harsh GOP, and skipped inconvenient lines of inquiry made by Republicans -- like why it took so long to unearth the damning text from FBI official Peter Strzok saying “we’ll stop it,” in reference to Trump’s election.
In the year since he appointed Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel, Mr. Rosenstein has emerged as one of the chief targets of House Republicans critical of the ongoing investigation. Thursday’s resolution passed along party lines, 226 to 183, as he and other department officials were working furiously to meet the requests of the Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.
In Fandos’s eyes, anything Rosenstein says is absolute truth, not merely an “assertion,” which is something only Trump does.
But in the hearing room, Republicans advanced a wide range of topics, including now-familiar and largely unsubstantiated charges against Mr. Rosenstein and the special counsel investigation that he oversees. One by one, the deputy attorney general sought to dispose of them.
Contrary to Mr. Trump’s repeated assertions -- including in a Thursday morning tweet -- Mr. Rosenstein said he was “not aware of any disqualifying conflict of interest” involving Mr. Mueller.
