Better in their words…

WSJ 3/7/2017

Well, that was predictable. Senate Democrats hounded Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself last week from any investigation into Russia and the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and no wonder. Now Democrats are threatening to hold up President Trump’s nominee to be deputy AG unless he promises to appoint the special prosecutor they want.

On Tuesday the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Rod Rosenstein, who for many years served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland and is now up for the number two job at the Justice Department. With Mr. Sessions recused, the final decisions on any probe would fall to Mr. Rosenstein if he is confirmed by the Senate.

Suddenly, Democrats see a political extortion opportunity. “I’ll use every possible tool to block DOJ Deputy AG nominee,” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) tweeted Sunday, “unless he commits to appoint independent special prosecutor.” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor Monday to declare that whether Mr. Rosenstein would appoint a special prosecutor “will be front and center tomorrow, and far and away the most important question he needs to answer.”

A special prosecutor is the worst possible way to inform Americans about the Russia episode. He’d operate in secret with a goal of criminal indictments when what the U.S. political system needs is information about what happened. Democrats have made many allegations but fear there may be nothing to find. A special prosecutor would let them continue to claim for months or years that the 2016 election was stolen even if no indictments were ever handed up.

The irony is that Mr. Rosenstein is the independent operator that Democrats say the country needs. He started as U.S. Attorney in 2005 under President George W. Bush and was confirmed by voice vote. In 2007 Mr. Bush tried to put Mr. Rosenstein on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, but Maryland’s Democratic Senators scuttled his nomination. President Obama kept Mr. Rosenstein on the job, and in 2012 then-AG Eric Holder appointed him and another prosecutor to look into national-security leaks. Mr. Holder called Mr. Rosenstein “highly-respected and experienced,” adding that he had “every confidence” that Mr. Rosenstein and his colleague Ronald Machen would “doggedly follow the facts and the evidence in the pursuit of justice wherever it leads.”

Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, then Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called the two “strong, capable and independent.”

In other words, Mr. Rosenstein is the kind of person Democrats should want as deputy attorney general. And if they believed their own previous advertising, they’d trust Mr. Rosenstein to make fair and honest legal judgments about any Russian investigation without appointing a special counsel.

Mr. Rosenstein should refuse to bend to this extortion in any case as a matter of political principle. He’d be bowing to undue pressure and suggesting that he and the Justice Department can’t be trusted to do the job. He also hasn’t reviewed the facts that have been collected so far by the FBI, if there are any.

Still, this episode is instructive: Democrats have for weeks demanded total and immediate information about the Trump Administration’s connections with Russia. Now they’re threatening to delay the confirmation of someone who could help determine what really happened.

Democrats strong-arm a nominee to name a special prosecutor.