Opinion | Rod Rosenstein Was Just Doing His Job - The New York Times - 0 views
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Rosenstein’s complicity in this machine was ugly, but it was by no means unique. Top officials at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services all played a role. They were all sowing chaos, inflicting cruelty and causing unfathomable trauma at the behest of a small, vicious cadre up top
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his argument was this: The jail time for these misdemeanors was usually a matter of days. So why were these parents not being reunited with their children afterward? “What became clear,” he told me, “is that they never had any intention of reuniting them until the parent gave up and was deported, if ever.”
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The federal judge in San Diego agreed, saying the government’s behavior “shocks the conscience,” that the separation policy violated due process and that all separated families had to be reunited within 30 days.
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what galls Gelernt now, after seeing the Times report about the inspector general’s investigation, is that his suspicions were right all along: Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly told the local U.S. attorneys.
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When the number of immigrants surged at the border in 2014, President Barack Obama responded by building more detention facilities and holding families indefinitely — though still together — and faced a legal backlash.
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But Trump’s policy was something altogether different. It was child abuse, plain and simple. “That’s why it’s so chilling,” Gelernt told me. “D.O.J. officials apparently declined to exempt even cases with a baby.
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note what Rosenstein did not deny: That he refused his U.S. attorneys permission to automatically exempt undocumented immigrants with young children from prosecution.
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what we have lately learned about Rosenstein is that he is a very canny political operator. He has a gift for threading needles that even a tailor would envy.
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While serving in the Trump Justice Department, for instance, he wrote a memo recommending the removal of James Comey as the head of the F.B.I., and he later defended his boss, William Barr, after he misled the public about the results of the Mueller investigation
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But he also had the presence of mind to appoint Robert S. Mueller in the first place — and, though he has denied it, to question Trump’s own presence of mind. (It has been reported that he suggested secretly recording Trump’s ravings in order to expose him as unfit to lead.)
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when it was Rosenstein’s turn, he did nothing to stop government-orchestrated cruelty. Instead, he simply did his job.