The newspaper reported on Friday that the deputy attorney general discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president from power and talked about wearing a wire during meetings with him in conversations last spring. A Justice Department spokesperson told the Times that Rosenstein was only joking about secretly recording Trump, while Rosenstein himself said that “inaccurate and factually incorrect” and that “there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
It’s hard to imagine a news story that could more effectively arouse Trump’s ire than this one. He frequently lashes out against the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt” created by his political enemies to overturn the 2016 election. The Times’ account likely will heighten Trump’s hostility and paranoia, especially after an anonymous “senior administration official” raised similar concerns in a Times op-ed earlier this month.
The story comes at a conspicuous time for the administration. Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s Supreme Court nominee, is facing an allegation of sexual assault that may imperil his confirmation by the Senate. Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia investigation despite Trump’s implicit offer of a pardon if he kept quiet. Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, is also reportedly telling Mueller’s investigators what he knows about Russia-related matters. Democrats are increasingly set to retake the House of Representatives and perhaps even the Senate in the November midterm elections.
That raises questions about why Rosenstein’s comments are coming to light now. The Times attributes its account to contemporaneous memos written by Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director fired in January, as well as people briefed on either Rosenstein’s conversations and the memos’ contents. It’s impossible to know whether those sources meant to give Trump a justification to oust the man who oversees the Russia investigation. But they may have done just that.