Dems rail against release of Strzok-Page text messages
Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of 58 House Democrats to vote in favor of impeaching Trump, attacked Rosenstein and the Department of Justice on the House floor on Thursday.
Raskin claimed the release of the text messages shows “that there are people in the Department of Justice who apparently are cooperating with this effort to undermine the integrity and the strength of this special counsel investigation.”
The DOJ, Raskin argued, should have withheld the damning messages, which were exchanged on taxpayer-funded cell phones.
Raskin said “the key thing to understand is that all of those text messages are totally irrelevant” and claimed they were nothing more than political opinions.
Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Mother Jones on Wednesday that the messages “are being used for propaganda purposes.” She added: “I think there’s an ongoing effort to malign both Bob Mueller and the work that that Special Counsel Office is doing. They are grabbing at every single thing to try to demean him.”
Benjamin Wittes, a staunch ally of former FBI director James Comey, claimed in a blog post that the text messages’ publication were part of “a partisan circus.”
Wittes is a close friend of Comey and has been one of his strongest public defenders since he was fired as FBI director. In May, Wittes relayed that Comey had “concerns” about Rosenstein as assistant attorney general. Now, as an internal DOJ investigation sheds light on a troubled FBI under Comey, Wittes is ramping up the attacks on Rosenstein.
“Rosenstein here has, at a minimum, contributed to that circus—at the expense of his own employees. In throwing a career FBI agent and career FBI lawyer to the wolves by authorizing the release to the public of their private text messages—without any finding that they had done anything wrong—he once again sent a message to his workforce that he is not the sort of man with whom you want to share your foxhole,” Wittes wrote on his LawFare blog.
He added a warning: “The DOJ and FBI workforces will not forget that. Nor should they.”
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