BREAKING. House Conservatives File Articles of Impeachment on Rod Rosenstein

By streiff | 7:44 PM on July 25, 2018

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Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, speaks next to Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., left, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-North Carolina, and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., during a news conference with House members, where they called for a second prosecutor to investigate the Dept. of Justice and FBI, Tuesday, May 22, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Wow. They actually went through with it.

11 House Republicans introduce articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. https://t.co/15mkU5YZwT

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 25, 2018

House conservatives have filed articles of impeachment in an effort to oust Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the overseer of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The articles, filed late Wednesday by Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — two top Trump allies — blast Rosenstein for what they allege was a failure to respond to congressional document demands. Senior Justice Department officials have rejected the criticism and described historic levels of cooperation with Congress to share files connected to the FBI investigations of Hillary Clinton’s email server and Trump campaign contacts with Russia.

This is political theater but very necessary political theater.

Rod Rosenstein has shown that he is simply not up to the task of being the Number Two guy at Department of Justice. The Justice bureaucracy has had its way with him in every conceivable time, place or manner. That they don’t respect him is obvious from the way they wind him up to go off and burn his own credibility and political capital fighting the House Speaker and usually three very powerful chairmen, he gets his ass whipped, and they do the same thing again. Rosenstein has been publicly rolled by the House at least five times. Heaven knows how many times it has happened in private. What is inexplicable is the utter lack of self-respect that Rosenstein shows for himself by allowing his subordinates to prep him with really bad information that results in his nationally televised humiliation time and again.

Aside from the garden variety managerial incompetence, Rosenstein appears to be blissfully unaware of the politics of this, the fact that Trump needs support in the House much more than he needs Woody Allen as his deputy attorney general, and Rosenstein is completely unable to set any limits or controls on the actions of the special counsel. Far from supervising Mueller, Rosenstein seems to be heavily involved in making sammiches for him.

This motion probably isn’t going anywhere but it puts Rosenstein in a completely different position in his job. This is a signal that a lot of important people on the Hill no longer trust Rosenstein to do his job. I suspect that this is going to lead to the White House intervening on many of the document release and declassification issues still hanging out there. And I suspect Rosenstein either does his own Walk to Canossa (no link, you guys have to look this up) or he will be fired.