Rod Rosenstein was a snake in the grass who protected Trump from a counterintel investigation. Here’s how he did it.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what Weissmann is implying here.

Weissmann is clearly pointing his accusatory finger at *Rod Rosenstein*. RR was the snake in the grass who made sure that there was no counterintel investigation. 1/17

Rosenstein did this by making sure that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing (or not doing). 2/17

First, he told Mueller to limit his investigation to criminal matters (though of course any such investigation would inevitably turn up relevant counterintel findings as well). 3/17

Meanwhile, Team Mueller naturally assumed that main FBI was conducting a counterintel investigation. That is the very point that Weissmann makes in his second tweet. 4/17

Schmidt got it wrong, Weissmann says, when he claimed that RR concluded the FBI “lacked sufficient reason to conduct a counterintel investigation.”

Weissmann says that RR couldn’t have asserted that, and cites Rosenstein’s Special Order that explicitly contradicts it. 5/17

The Order — (b)(1) — specifically authorizes the Special Counsel to investigate “any [emphasis mine] links/and or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” 6/17

This is pure, unadulterated counterintel stuff. But then, Weissmann informs us, RR told Mueller that he was to focus on the criminal stuff, and no suspicions were aroused because Team Mueller knew there were FBI embeds on the team who sent their memos to main FBI. 7/17

But we now learn from Schmidt’s NYT article that RR cancelled the FBI’s counterintel investigation.

How did he get away with it? For example, why didn’t McCabe know what was going on? 8/17

Answer: because McCabe didn’t know what RR had told Mueller, and RR gave McCabe the impression that Mueller himself was conducting the counterintel investigation. 9/17

Meanwhile, the memos by the FBI embeds in Team Mueller were being sent to file and sequestered there.

(How this happened, and where the memos went, is the one remaining mystery.) 10/17

Rosenstein had better be hoping and praying that Trump gets reelected, because if he isn’t, there is going to be a grand jury-empowered investigation over this, RR will be subpoenaed, and he will have a lot of explaining to do. 11/17

Among other things, he will have to explain why no counterintel investigation was conducted on his watch, despite the clear wording of the SC Special Order language (b)(1), and to explain what happened to the stream of memos from the FBI embeds. 12/17

Note that the stream of memos referred to above must exist in the FBI files somewhere, because it would be a violation of federal law to destroy them.

Christopher Wray surely knows about them, but has chosen to remain silent, 13/17

probably because he was worried (as they all were ) of being fired by a lawless president and replaced by a Trump flunkey — which, as we know, has often happened. 14/17

Contrary to what a lot of people are alleging, Wray is NOT a pawn of Trump. He loathes him. 15/17

When RR happily passed the baton to Trump’s Roy Cohn (Bill Barr) he must have told Barr that there was no counterintel investigation for him to be concerned about, 16/17

but of course *BARR* wasn’t going to blow the whistle on Rosenstein. (Barr, too, will be put under oath eventually.)

This is a HUGE story. 17/17