Dear Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein: 
 
 
 
 It’s rare that any single person has to bear as much responsibility for safeguarding American democracy as you find yourself carrying now. Even before President Trump’s shocking decision on Tuesday to fire the F.B.I. director, James Comey, a dark cloud of suspicion surrounded this president, and the very integrity of the electoral process that put him in office. At this fraught moment you find yourself, improbably, to be the person with the most authority to dispel that cloud and restore Americans’ confidence in their government. We sympathize; that’s a lot of pressure. 
 
 Given the sterling reputation you brought into this post — including a 27-year career in the Justice Department under five administrations, and the distinction of being the longest-serving United States attorney in history — you no doubt feel a particular anguish, and obligation to act. As the author of the memo that the president cited in firing Mr. Comey, you are now deeply implicated in that decision. 
 
 It was a solid brief; Mr. Comey’s misjudgments in his handling of the F.B.I. investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server were indeed serious. Yet you must know that these fair criticisms were mere pretext for Mr. Trump, who dumped Mr. Comey just as he was seeking more resources to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. 
 
 You must also know that in ordering you to write the memo, Mr. Trump exploited the integrity you have earned over nearly three decades in public service, spending down your credibility as selfishly as he has spent other people’s money throughout his business career. We can only hope that your lack of an explicit recommendation to fire Mr. Comey reflects your own refusal to go as far as the president wanted you to. ||||| No frills. Apolitical. The “poster child for the professional, competent, ethical, and fair-minded prosecutor” is one way Rosenstein has been described. Now he finds himself in an unfamiliar position, and in an administration lavished in controversy. 
 
 Before he left his position in Maryland, Rosenstein reflected on his 12 years as the most powerful prosecutor in the state in an interview with The Baltimore Sun. He had just been voted into office, and as he readied to move to Washington, D.C., he said he hoped to continue doing his “job without regard to partisan political consideration.”And for decades that seemed his primary task. He grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (where Trump also studied). He earned a law degree from Harvard in 1989, then took a job in the DOJ’s public-integrity section. 
 
 In the mid-1990s Rosenstein was recruited to a team of prosecutors that handled the Whitewater Development Corporation investigation, the case that looked into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s business dealings with an associate. In what was a highly politicized, highly partisan investigation, Rosenstein came out in exemplary form. “I would have trusted him with anything,” Philip B. Heymann, who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration told The Washington Post in 2011. “If there was a case where I was worried there was a perception we were being unfair, I would trust him to do the right thing and to do the job.” 
 
 In 2005 Rosenstein became the top federal prosecutor in Maryland, and one of his most memorable cases was that of Jack B. Johnson, county executive for Prince George’s County. Johnson was accused of taking more than a million in bribes, extorting witnesses, and evidence tampering. The case against him was credited with being so tight that Johnson and 14 others pleaded guilty before it went to trial. Soon, the Bush administration transitioned to the Obama administration, and Rosenstein was kept on. 
 
 When Trump came to the White House, he was the only remaining holdover from the Bush era. In the interview with the Sun, Rosenstein said that as Trump took office he got calls from attorneys all over the country asking how they might keep their jobs. “Here’s what I did,” Rosenstein told the Sun about his advice, “I sat in my office and did my job, and I’m grateful someone made the decision to keep me here.” 
 
 Unlike his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Rosenstein did not campaign with Trump or offer any kind of high-profile support. But his straight-arrow reputation may have been a useful tool for the administration. 
 
 In one alternative theory to that proffered by some Democrats—in which Trump’s decision to fire Comey grew out of a fear that the FBI was increasingly prying into his office’s links with Russia—there’s a different sort of timeline. Byron York wrote in the Washington Examiner that perhaps Trump had always planned to fire Comey, but was just waiting for Rosenstein to make it happen. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| (CNN) Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein emerged this week as perhaps the most unlikely character in the politically charged drama over the firing of FBI Director James Comey. 
 
 Publicly at least, Rosenstein played the role of President Donald Trump's main hatchet man, with the White House pointing repeatedly to his recommendation to terminate Comey as a deciding factor in the president's thinking. It was Rosenstein, Vice President Mike Pence told reporters, who "brought the recommendation to the president." 
 
 In more than a quarter-century in government, the Harvard-trained Rosenstein has cultivated an image as a low-key and down-the-middle prosecutor, a political survivor appointed to top jobs by both Democrats and Republicans. "Straight shooter" was the innocuous phrase often used to describe him. 
 
 First nominated as a United States attorney in Maryland by President George W. Bush, he was so uncontroversial that President Barack Obama kept him on the job. He lasted all eight years of the Obama administration before Trump nominated him for the Justice Department's second-highest post to serve, in effect, as its chief executive officer, and the Senate confirmed him on a 94-6 vote last month in a rare display of near-bipartisanship. 
 
 Many senators saw Rosenstein as a sober-minded and independent lawyer who would help steady the Justice Department after the bruising confirmation battle of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose history on race and civil rights became attack points for Democrats. After Sessions' undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador forced him to remove himself from any investigation into the Trump campaign's Russia ties, Rosenstein took over the probe. 
 
 Rosenstein and Comey had worked together for years, and at his Senate confirmation hearing in March, Rosenstein showed no sign of reservations about Comey's role at the FBI. He mentioned Comey by name twice in saying he would work with him on sensitive political issues. 
 
 But barely two weeks into his new job, all that appears to have changed. 
 
 There were conflicting accounts about whether Rosenstein acted on his own or at the direction of the White House. But in the end, he sent over a memo to Trump lambasting Comey's judgment in his public handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. 
 
 The Justice Department said Rosenstein was not available for comment. 
 
 Trump fired Comey late Tuesday just hours after receiving Rosenstein's formal recommendation, which attempted to give the firing a somewhat less raw and political veneer. 
 
 Rosenstein's key role in the drama surprised a number of his current and former colleagues at the Justice Department, leaving some to wonder whether he acted on his own or felt obliged to carry out Trump's wishes. 
 
 "It's not consistent that he walked in here with a hit list and James Comey's name was on the top of it. That's inconsistent with who he is and what everyone says," one law enforcement official said. "This doesn't pass the smell test of Rod Rosenstein." 
 
 His prominence in the firing also threatened to undermine the integrity of the ongoing Russia probe and to further damage relations between the Justice Department and the FBI, where Comey maintains some support. 
 
 "The relationship between FBI and Justice before yesterday was already bad, but after this, it's really toxic," said a former federal prosecutor who worked with both Rosenstein and Comey. 
 
 Rosenstein's part in the firing drew even more scrutiny Tuesday after reports that Comey had gone to him just last week to seek more resources for the FBI's Russia investigation. 
 
 "It just seemed really odd that he would be let go right after that," said a former senior FBI agent. 
 
 Trump administration officials, however, denied that Comey had asked Rosenstein for more resources for the Russia investigation, and they dismissed any suggestion that Rosenstein's recommendation had anything to do with Russia. 
 
 "Everybody across the board has unequivocally said this guy is a man of upstanding character," said White House Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, "and essentially the gold standard at the Department of Justice." 
 
 Correction: This story has been updated to remove tweets from an unverified account falsely claiming to belong to Rosenstein. ||||| Every time FBI Director James B. Comey appeared in public, an ever-watchful President Trump grew increasingly agitated that the topic was the one that he was most desperate to avoid: Russia. 
 
 Trump had long questioned Comey’s loyalty and judgment, and was infuriated by what he viewed as the director’s lack of action in recent weeks on leaks from within the federal government. By last weekend, he had made up his mind: Comey had to go. 
 
 At his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., Trump groused over Comey’s latest congressional testimony, which he thought was “strange,” and grew impatient with what he viewed as his sanctimony, according to White House officials. Comey, Trump figured, was using the Russia probe to become a martyr. 
 
 Back at work Monday morning in Washington, Trump told Vice President Pence and several senior aides — Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon and Donald McGahn, among others — that he was ready to move on Comey. First, though, he wanted to talk with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his trusted confidant, and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly. Trump summoned the two of them to the White House for a meeting, according to a person close to the White House. 
 
 The president already had decided to fire Comey, according to this person. But in the meeting, several White House officials said Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey. 
 
 1 of 28 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The scene in Washington after FBI Director Comey was fired View Photos President Trump’s firing of James B. Comey consumed Capitol Hill’s attention. Democrats slowed committee business in the Senate to protest the lack of an independent investigation into Russia’s election meddling, and Republicans saw rifts emerge as more questioned the president’s decision. Caption President Trump’s firing of James B. Comey consumed Capitol Hill’s attention. Democrats slowed committee business in the Senate to protest the lack of an independent investigation into Russia’s election meddling, and Republicans saw rifts emerge as more questioned the president’s decision. May 9, 2017 White House press secretary Sean Spicer speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after President Trump dismissed James B. Comey from his position as FBI director. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 The pair quickly fulfilled the boss’s orders, and the next day Trump fired Comey — a breathtaking move that thrust a White House already accustomed to chaos into a new level of tumult, one that has legal as well as political consequences. 
 
 [Flashback to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre] 
 
 Rosenstein threatened to resign after the narrative emerging from the White House on Tuesday evening cast him as a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and that the president acted only on his recommendation, said the person close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. 
 
 Justice Department officials declined to comment. 
 
 The stated rationale for Comey’s firing delivered Wednesday by principal deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was that he had committed “atrocities” in overseeing the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, hurting morale in the bureau and compromising public trust. 
 
 “He wasn’t doing a good job,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “Very simple. He wasn’t doing a good job.” 
 
 But the private accounts of more than 30 officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and on Capitol Hill, as well as Trump confidants and other senior Republicans, paint a conflicting narrative centered on the president’s brewing personal animus toward Comey. Many of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to candidly discuss internal deliberations. 
 
 Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists. 
 
 The known actions that led to Comey’s dismissal raise as many questions as answers. Why was Sessions involved in discussions about the fate of the man leading the FBI’s Russia investigation, after having recused himself from the probe because he had falsely denied under oath his own past communications with the Russian ambassador? 
 
 Why had Trump discussed the Russia probe with the FBI director three times, as he claimed in his letter dismissing Comey, which could have been a violation of Justice Department policies that ongoing investigations generally are not to be discussed with White House officials? 
 
 And how much was the timing of Trump’s decision shaped by events spiraling out of his control — such as Monday’s testimony about Russian interference by former acting attorney general Sally Yates, or the fact that Comey last week requested more resources from the Justice Department to expand the FBI’s Russia probe? 
 
 In the weeks leading up to Comey’s firing, Trump administration officials had repeatedly urged the FBI to more aggressively pursue leak investigations, according to people familiar with the discussions. Administration officials sometimes sought to push the FBI to prioritize leak probes over the Russia interference case, and at other times urged the bureau to investigate disclosures of information that was not classified or highly sensitive and therefore did not constitute crimes, these people said. 
 
 Over time, administration officials grew increasingly dissatisfied with the FBI’s actions on that front. Comey’s appearances at congressional hearings caused even more tension between the White House and FBI, as Trump administration officials were angered that the director’s statements increased, rather than diminished, public attention on the Russia probe, officials said. 
 
 In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate. FBI officials declined to comment on the statement, and a White House official refused to discuss conversations between Trump and Comey. 
 
 ‘Essentially declared war’ 
 
 Within the Justice Department and the FBI, the firing of Comey has left raw anger, and some fear, according to multiple officials. Thomas O’Connor, the president of the FBI Agents Association, called Comey’s firing “a gut punch. We didn’t see it coming, and we don’t think Director Comey did anything that would lead to this.’’ 
 
 Many employees said they were furious about the firing, saying the circumstances of his dismissal did more damage to the FBI’s independence than anything Comey did in his three-plus years in the job. 
 
 One intelligence official who works on Russian espionage matters said they were more determined than ever to pursue such cases. Another said Comey’s firing and the subsequent comments from the White House are attacks that won’t soon be forgotten. Trump had “essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” one official said. “I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.” 
 
 While Trump and his aides sought to justify Comey’s firing, the now-canned FBI director, back from a work trip to Los Angeles, kept a low profile. He was observed puttering in his yard at his home in Northern Virginia on Wednesday. 
 
 In a message to FBI staff late Wednesday, Comey wrote: “I have long believed that a President can fire an FBI Director for any reason, or for no reason at all. I’m not going to spend time on the decision or the way it was executed. I hope you won’t either. It is done, and I will be fine, although I will miss you and the mission deeply.” 
 
 He added that “in times of turbulence, the American people should see the FBI as a rock of competence, honesty, and independence.” 
 
 Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Trump, said the FBI director misunderstood the president: “James Comey made the mistake of thinking that just because he announced the FBI was investigating possible collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, he had unfettered job security. In my opinion, the president should have fired Comey the day he was sworn in.” 
 
 George Lombardi, a friend of the president and a frequent guest at his Mar-a-Lago Club, said: “This was a long time coming. There had been a lot of arguments back and forth in the White House and during the campaign, a lot of talk about what side of the fence [Comey] was on or if he was above political dirty tricks.” 
 
 Dating to the campaign, several men personally close to Trump deeply distrusted Comey and helped feed the candidate-turned-president’s suspicions of the FBI director, who declined to recommend charges against Clinton for what they all agreed was a criminal offense, according to several people familiar with the dynamic. 
 
 The men influencing Trump include Roger J. Stone, a self-proclaimed dirty trickster and longtime Trump confidant who himself has been linked to the FBI’s Russia investigation; former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Comey critic who has been known to kibbitz about the ousted FBI director with like-minded law enforcement figures; and Keith Schiller, a former New York police officer who functioned as Trump’s chief bodyguard and works in the West Wing as director of Oval Office operations. 
 
 “What Comey did to Hillary was disgraceful,” Stone said. “I’m glad Trump fired him over it.” 
 
 In fact, it was Schiller whom Trump tasked with hand-delivering a manila envelope containing the president’s termination letter to Comey’s office at FBI headquarters Tuesday afternoon. Trump’s aides did not appear to know that Comey would be out of the office, traveling on a recruiting trip in California, according to a White House official. 
 
 A chaotic response 
 
 Within the West Wing, there was little apparent dissent over the president’s decision to fire Comey, according to the accounts of several White House officials. McGahn, the White House counsel, and Priebus, the chief of staff, walked Trump through how the dismissal would work, with McGahn’s legal team taking the lead and coordinating with the Justice Department. 
 
 Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom work in the White House — have frequently tried to blunt Trump’s riskier impulses but did not intervene to try to persuade him against firing Comey, according to two senior officials. 
 
 Trump kept a close hold on the process. White House press secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Michael Dubke were brought into the Oval Office and informed of the Comey decision just an hour before the news was announced. Other staffers in the West Wing found out about the FBI director’s firing when their cellphones buzzed with news alerts beginning around 5:40 p.m. 
 
 The media explosion was immediate and the political backlash was swift, with criticism pouring in not only from Democrats, but also from some Republicans. Trump and some of his advisers did not fully anticipate the ferocious reaction — in fact, some wrongly assumed many Democrats would support the move because they had been critical of Comey in the past — and were unprepared to contain the fallout. 
 
 When asked Tuesday night for an update on the unfolding situation, one top White House aide simply texted a reporter two fireworks emoji. 
 
 “I think the surprise of a great many in the White House was that as soon as this became a Trump decision, all of the Democrats who had long been calling for Comey’s ouster decided that this was now an awful decision,” Dubke said. “So there was a surprise at the politicization of Democrats on this so immediately and so universally.” 
 
 Trump’s team did not have a full-fledged communications strategy for how to announce and then explain the decision. As Trump, who had retired to the residence to eat dinner, sat in front of a television watching cable news coverage of Comey’s firing, he noticed another flaw: Nobody was defending him. 
 
 The president was irate, according to White House officials. Trump pinned much of the blame on Spicer and Dubke’s communications operation, wondering how there could be so many press staffers yet such negative coverage on cable news — although he, Priebus and others had afforded them almost no time to prepare. 
 
 “This is probably the most egregious example of press and communications incompetence since we’ve been here,” one West Wing official said. “It was an absolute disaster. And the president watched it unfold firsthand. He could see it.” 
 
 Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said Trump bears some responsibility for the turmoil because he kept the decision secret from some key aides. 
 
 “You can’t be the quarterback of the team if the rest of the team is not in the huddle,” Gingrich said. “The president has to learn to go a couple steps slower so that everyone can organize around him. When you don’t loop people in, you deprive yourself of all of the opportunities available to a president of the United States.” 
 
 For more than two hours after the news broke, Trump had no official spokesman, as his army of communications aides scrambled to craft a plan. By nightfall, Trump had ordered his talkers to talk; one adviser said the president wanted “his people” on the airwaves. 
 
 Counselor Kellyanne Conway ventured into what White House aides call “the lions’ den,” appearing on CNN both Tuesday night and Wednesday morning for combative interviews. “Especially on your network, you always want to talk about Russia, Russia, Russia,” Conway told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday. 
 
 Sanders went Tuesday night to the friendly confines of Fox News Channel, but Wednesday parried questions from the more adversarial hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” 
 
 Spicer, meanwhile, threw together an impromptu news conference with reporters in the White House driveway, a few minutes before he taped a series of short television interviews inside the West Wing, where the lighting was better for the cameras. The press secretary stood alongside tall hedges in near darkness and agreed to answer questions with the cameras shuttered. 
 
 “Just turn the lights off,” Spicer ordered. “Turn the lights off. We’ll take care of this.” 
 
 Devlin Barrett, Jenna Johnson, Damian Paletta and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report. ||||| When he accepted the role of deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein had no way of knowing he would end up right smack in the middle of the biggest crisis to rock Donald Trump’s presidency so far. 
 
 The Jewish lawyer from Maryland rode a low-key reputation as a fair-minded federal prosecutor to overwhelming congressional confirmation — and it won him praise from both sides of the aisle. 
 
 But just a couple of weeks later, Rosenstein is facing a firestorm of criticism over the probe into Russian meddling in American politics — and over his controversial role in the firing of FBI Director James Comey. 
 
 Trump cited a memo written by Rosenstein as his rationale for dumping Comey. Rosenstein and his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, reportedly journeyed to the White House Monday to make the case for firing the FBI chief. 
 
 The memo focused on Comey’s handling of the probe into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails and on Comey’s misstatements before Congress about how some of those emails wound up being sent from Clinton aide Huma Abedin to her disgraced husband, Anthony Weiner. 
 
 But Democrats and some Republicans quickly pounced on Rosenstein’s memo as a cover for what they call Trump’s real motivation: to shut down the investigation into Russia’s election meddling. 
 
 Rosenstein was so shaken by the reaction to Comey’s dismissal that he threatened to resign after his memo was portrayed as the main impetus behind the firing, The Washington Post reported.. The memo did not explicitly call for Comey’s ouster, although it suggested that the FBI needed better leadership. 
 
 Two former senior Justice Department officials told Reuters that it made little sense to fire Comey while the Justice Department was still doing a review of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. 
 
 “I take Rod (Rosenstein) at his word that be believed everything in that memo, but he must know that it’s going to be used as a fig leaf to fire Comey,” one former official said. 
 
 All these questions were only magnified by revelations that Rosenstein also may have been the first to understand how deeply Comey planned to dig into the Russian connection. The FBI director reportedly approached Rosenstein several days ago and asked for more resources needed for the Russian investigation. This request tipped off Rosenstein that Comey’s investigation was expanding. 
 
 Critics slammed Rosenstein who, instead of responding to Comey’s request, penned the memo calling for his ouster. They suggested that the decision raises questions about his independence from Trump — questions that few had raised before about Rosenstein. 
 
 “I have lost any confidence I might have had” in Rosenstein, Sen. Mark Warner said. The Virginia Democrat lambasted Rosenstein for “putting his name on that letter basically making what appeared to be bogus reasons for firing the FBI director.” 
 
 Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz tweeted: “We need A.G. Sessions and DAG Rosenstein to come to the Hill to explain what happened and in what order. Lots of mind-bending explanations.” 
 
 Benjamin Wittes, editor of the respected Lawfare blog, added in a tweet: “I’ve known Rod Rosenstein a long time. I’ve always thought well of him. I was cheered by his nomination. I misjudged him completely.” 
 
 It seems ages ago that Rosenstein was lauded by Democrats and Republicans alike as a perfect choice to be the No. 2 man at the Justice Department. 
 
 Rosenstein, 52, is not widely known in the Jewish community. 
 
 Born and raised in Philadelphia, he earned a merit scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business — also Trump’s alma mater. He later attended Harvard Law School, joining the conservative Federalist Society, which gave him a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006. 
 
 He was a member of Washington’s Reform Temple Sinai from 2008 to 2014, and of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from 2001 to 2011. 
 
 According to a questionnaire he filled out ahead of his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this year, Rosenstein also was a member of a “Jewish Community Center Sports League” from 1993 to 2012. 
 
 Rosenstein climbed the ranks of the government justice system, starting off as a counsel to the Clinton White House. He was the longest-serving U.S. attorney and one of only three who were asked to stay on as the administrations shifted. His partisan affiliation remains unknown, and his record as a prosecutor shows no clear political tilt. 
 
 “He’s a solid guy,” Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, a staunch progressive, said before Rosenstein’s confirmation hearings. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein praised Rosenstein’s “impressive credentials.” 
 
 He was approved in a bipartisan 94-6 vote. 
 
 Shortly after Rosenstein’s nomination, it was revealed that Sessions did not disclose meetings with the Russian ambassador, forcing Sessions to recuse himself from dealing with the Russian investigation. 
 
 That catapulted Rosenstein into the hot-button role overseeing the inquiry into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 elections and any possible collusion between the Russians and Trump’s presidential campaign. 
 
 Overseeing the Russia probe alone would be a hugely sensitive position and likely would have eventually yput him in the crosshairs of sniping from Democrats and Trump loyalists alike. But the Comey memo has laid to rest any chance of Rosenstein staying above the partisan fray. 
 
 Despite the firestorm of criticism, some colleagues stood by Rosenstein. 
 
 Former Department of Justice attorney Jason Weinstein, a colleague of Rosenstein from the George W. Bush administration, predicted that his reputation will survive intact. 
 
 “He makes decisions the same way he did during his decades as a career prosecutor,” Weinstein told Fox News. “This is a partisan minefield no matter what he decides, but partisanship won’t be part of the equation for him.” 
 
 With JTA 
 
 Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com or on Twitter, @nathanguttman ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
– An unfamiliar name has suddenly become much more familiar this week in the wake of the James Comey firing. It's that of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has emerged as a leading, if reluctant, figure in the controversy. Rosenstein wrote a memo to President Trump that criticizes Comey at length, though he reportedly feels he was unfairly set up to be the villain in the firing. Related coverage: Threat to quit: The Washington Post reports that Rosenstein threatened to resign over the chain of events. As the story lays it out, Trump had already decided he wanted to fire Comey when he asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein to write memos justifying the decision. But the White House has been suggesting that Trump made his decision in response to the memos, particularly Rosenstein's. (Update: Trump himself said Thursday that he planned to fire Comey anyway.) The memo: Read the actual Rosenstein memo on Comey at the Baltimore Sun. The focus is on Comey's handling of Hillary Clinton's email mess. What it doesn't say: Though it comes close, the memo does not explicitly recommend that Comey be fired, observes the Los Angeles Times. Who is Rosenstein? He's been deputy attorney general for only about two weeks, but prior to that the 52-year-old was a Justice Department attorney with an unusual resume: He served under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In a profile, the Atlantic notes that his "integrity has been compared to that of Jimmy Stewart, the actor who portrayed egoless small-town heroes driven by bygone ideals: of right and wrong, and black and white in a world gone increasing gray." Another profile at CNN echoes the point and calls him the "unlikely hatchet man" in the Comey story. Now a target: A Forward piece notes that Rosenstein was confirmed to the Justice Department's No. 2 post by a vote of 94-6 in the Senate, a feat of rare bipartisanship. But he's now being publicly criticized over Comey, and the story raises the question of whether he'll be able to survive the "growing firestorm." A plea to Rosenstein: The New York Times editorial board has written an open letter to Rosenstein, asserting that Trump has exploited his integrity and urging him to name a special counsel for the Russia investigation, even if it costs him his job.