Four months ago, shortly after President Donald Trump's Twitter account sent out an image suggesting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should be prosecuted and imprisoned for appointing special counsel Robert Mueller, the president took the rare step of telling Rosenstein it was a mistake, according
to a former Justice Department official informed of the conversation.
Last year, Trump's outside advisers reportedly wanted the president to take a harder public stand against Rosenstein. But appearing on Fox News at the time, Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani offered this philosophy:"Rod Rosenstein is one of the people in charge of this case, so I'm not going to get involved in critiquing his conduct unless at the end we have to."
To Trump's great dismay, Sessions had recused himself from overseeing the growing probe of Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election because of his previous work on Trump's campaign, forcing Rosenstein to handle the matter. "How could there be obstruction on firing Comey, when the man who’s in charge of [the investigation] wrote a letter that was far stronger than anything I would have written?" Trump said in a January 2018 interview with the Wall Street Journal.
One thing they wanted to know more about: a classified document Rosenstein signed authorizing Mueller's investigators to continue eavesdropping on a former Trump adviser. Republican leaders, however, blocked the impeachment effort, and as the political tussle with Rosenstein continued, Trump appeared on Fox News in October 2018.
But Trump, attending the U.N. General Assembly in New York, ultimately took a phone call from Rosenstein, who disputed the news accounts. At the time, sources told ABC News that the controversial remarks being reported were likely in jest.
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