Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein Tuesday said articles of impeachment drafted against him by members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus to an extortion attempt.
“There have been people who have been making threats privately and publicly against me for quite sometime and I think they should understand the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted,” he said speaking at The Newseum’s Law Day event. “We are going to do what is required by the rule of law and any kind of threats anybody makes are not going to effect the way we do our job.”
House Freedom Caucus members reportedly are seeking to impeach Mr. Rosenstein over alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Specifically, the drafts accuse Mr. Rosenstein of abusing his authority when he signed at least one renewal of the original FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Previous FISA warrants to spy on Mr. Page were signed by former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates along with other Justice Department officials.
The impeachment draft states that Mr. Rosenstein “failed to enforce multiple laws” including “improper authorization of searches and electronic surveillance” under FISA and failing to act on behalf of the Attorney General by “failing to demonstrate probable cause to believe the targets of surveillance were a foreign power or agents of a foreign power.”
Mr. Rosenstein fired back against the House members....
“They can’t even resist leaking their own drafts,” he said. “I just don’t have anything to say about documents like that, that nobody has the courage to put their name on and that they leak in that way.”