Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates on Saturday warned President Donald Trump against axing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Yates tweeted that firing Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, “would be the same unconscionable assault on the rule of law as firing Mueller.”
Rosenstein “controls scope of the Mueller investigation and what becomes public,” she wrote. “Both D’s and R’s should reject sham excuses to fire Rosenstein.”
“And you can’t fire a prosecutor because you’re unhappy he approved a search warrant that relates to your own conduct,” she wrote in a second tweet. “No one is above the law.”
Yates, an Obama appointee who, like Rosenstein, served as deputy attorney general, was fired by Trump in January of last year after refusing to defend his initial ban on travel from several majority-Muslim nations.
On Tuesday evening, CNN reported that Trump was considering firing Rosenstein, a move that could potentially further Trump’s goal of trying to put greater limits on special counsel Robert Mueller. The report came a day after the FBI raided the office of the President’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who has been “under criminal investigation” for months in New York because of his business dealings, the Justice Department said Friday.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders wouldn’t say whether Trump had in the previous 24 hours discussed firing Mueller, Rosenstein or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose recusal from matters related to Trump’s 2016 campaign left oversight of the Russia probe to Rosenstein. Rosenstein then appointed Mueller to be special counsel after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May of last year.
