On any other day, a key admission in a plot to destroy a presidency might have been the lead story in America’s newspapers and on its news broadcasts. But with the country’s cities burning and politicians promoting protests over social distancing amid a global pandemic, the story was only back-page and end-of-broadcast material.
In case you missed it, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday if he had known then what he knew now, he would never have signed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant renewal about Trump campaign aide Carter Page possibly being a Russian agent.
Had he not done that, the entire three-year Russian collusion investigation of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and of Trump himself likely would have petered out. Had it quickly dissolved, the administration may not have been slowed in getting Cabinet officials confirmed, not sputtered in being able to get its agenda moving forward and the national media might have had to acknowledge the soaring trajectory the country was on before the advent of the COVID-19 virus earlier this year.
“By any measure what the Obama/Biden administration did in 2016 and 2017 makes everything Richard Nixon even contemplated pale in comparison,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Rosenstein admitted Wednesday what had been exposed about the warrant – that the FBI “was not following the written protocols [during the Obama administration Department of Justice investigation], and that significant errors appeared in applications.”