Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein arrives to testify before a Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on "Crossfire Hurricane," the FBI's probe into Russian election interference and the 2016 Trump campaign on Wednesday. Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
Updated at 10:58 a.m. ET
Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Wednesday that if he knew then what he knows now, he would not have signed his now-infamous application to continue surveillance on an ex-junior aide to Donald Trump.
Rosenstein told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he relied on lower-level investigators and attorneys to do the right thing in preparing applications for the secret court that authorizes surveillance on Americans.
Now, he said, he recognizes via the subsequent investigations that those investigators and attorneys did not do the right thing — and accordingly, Rosenstein said he wouldn't have signed the application.
The former deputy attorney general defended the need for an investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election and said he stood by its findings and much of its work — but he also acknowledged that he and other Justice Department leaders were acting upon the information and understanding they had at the time.
Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., went ahead with a session Wednesday scheduled before the flare in protests and violence that followed the death of a Minneapolis man, George Floyd, at the hands of police in an incident that reignited long-simmering anger at police in cities across the country.
The political context has evolved: Republicans want to tie former Vice President Joe Biden into what they call the abuses of power from the end of the Obama era.
Graham and Republicans sought answers from Rosenstein about what he and other Justice Department leaders knew at the time they were making fateful decisions about the FBI's investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which sought to hinder Hillary Clinton and help elect then-candidate Donald Trump.
Strange days
Rosenstein found himself in the center of a political vortex in the spring of 2017, not long after he'd been nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate.
His boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, was a Trump loyalist and had recused himself from the Russian matter. The president had fired FBI Director James Comey.
In the midst of that febrile atmosphere, Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel and continue the Russia investigation.
"I was concerned the public would not have confidence in the investigation and that acting FBI director [at the time] was not the right person to lead it," Rosenstein told senators on Wednesday. "I decided appointment of special counsel was the best way to complete invest and promote public confidence in the conclusions."
Re-look after re-look has verified Mueller's findings about the Russian interference, but the work of the FBI and Justice Department wasn't found to be problem-free.
Issues with the FBI investigators involved and their dealings within officialdom, especially with the secret court that oversees government surveillance, have embarrassed the top levels of federal law enforcement.
Longtime target
Many Republicans have faulted Rosenstein since his earliest days over his appointment of Mueller.
Now, Graham has brought Rosenstein back to center stage at a time when Trump and other allies want to link Biden with intelligence collection that involved members of the Trump camp.
Biden's camp has rejected the idea there were any abuses and pointed out that there was no way for administration officials to single out Americans in intelligence reporting because their names were hidden, or masked.
They were only identified after requests for more information about who was talking with existing targets, Biden's campaign said.
That practice is legal and takes place thousands of times per year. Trump and allies have made it the basis of political attacks against Biden and others from that era.
Biden, in turn, has blasted Trump and Republicans for what he calls their attempt to distract attention from the most pressing challenges of the day — first the coronavirus pandemic and now the national unrest over police violence.
Democrats, who are in the minority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, took up that theme on Wednesday, led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. She also restated that the findings and much of the work of the Mueller era have been validated.
Feinstein emphasized with Rosenstein that the infamous, never-verified Russia dossier was not used as the basis to charge anyone.
And Rosenstein underlined what he called the important need to conduct investigations that might not necessarily lead to charges — and in the case of the Mueller era, no Americans ultimately were charged with conspiring with the Russians who attacked the election.
Republicans pressed Rosenstein over what they call surveillance abuses and the subsequent findings by investigators about problems with the FBI's practices at crucial junctures in the saga.
Rosenstein now is with the law firm King & Spalding but he has appeared before congressional inquisitors before. In the past, Rosenstein also has said that he relied on lower-level investigators and attorneys and wasn't involved with the operational details now known to be problematic.
Specifically, Rosenstein signed a request to continue surveillance on a former junior campaign aide to Trump, Carter Page, based on work product that has since been repudiated by internal investigators and the secret surveillance court.
Those details didn't become clear to the public until later.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., tried to emphasize with Rosenstein that although the Page surveillance application process was flawed, none of the other surveillance conducted in the Russia investigation suffered from the same problems. None of the Page problems invalidate the rest of the Mueller work, Leahy argued.
Graham, meanwhile, has sought to show the Judiciary Committee can keep many plates spinning at once.
The committee heard from witnesses on Tuesday about the deadly effects of the coronavirus within the federal prison system, and Graham also has planned a hearing later this month about policing, as a result of Floyd's death.
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