Super Thursday: Fates of Kavanaugh, Rosenstein may be decided on same day

Super Thursday: Fates of Kavanaugh, Rosenstein may be decided on same day – Emily Birnbaum, The Hill

Thursday is shaping up to be a pivotal day for the Trump administration and a remarkable day for all political junkies.

President Trump plans to meet with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the Senate is expected to hear testimony from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and a woman who has accused him of sexual assault.

The day may very well determine voter sentiment just six weeks before the November midterm elections.

Trump’s meeting with Rosenstein will come less than a week after a bombshell report by The New York Times said the No. 2 official at the Justice Department proposed secretly recording conversations with the president and discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment with Cabinet members to remove Trump from office.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, will hear from Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her during a high school party in 1982. Kavanaugh and the White House have repeatedly denied the accusation.

“White House says Trump and Rosenstein will meet on Thursday — the same day as the Kavanaugh hearing,” New York Times reporter Peter Baker tweeted on Monday. “Should be an interesting day in Washington.”

The White House announced the meeting with Rosenstein after multiple news reports on Monday said he had either resigned or was about to be fired. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement that Rosenstein and Trump will meet on Thursday, since the president is attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York and already has several meetings scheduled with world leaders.

Rosenstein oversees special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, an investigation that Trump has often called a “witch hunt.”

Trump on Monday left the door open to the possibility that he could fire his deputy attorney general. The president has publicly berated and insulted Rosenstein for months, raising speculation that a departure was on the horizon.

Kavanaugh and Ford are scheduled to testify in public starting at 10 a.m. It is not yet known what time Trump and Rosenstein are set to meet on Thursday.

Some political commentators on Monday suggested that the White House intentionally planned the Rosenstein meeting for Thursday in order to distract from Kavanaugh’s hearing, when he’ll be grilled about recent accusations of sexual misconduct.

“Now WH says [Trump] will meet with Rosenstein on Thursday,” tweeted David Axelrod, a CNN senior political commentator. “What better day to cashier him, the same day that Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh hearing is scheduled?”

Kavanaugh will likely field questions regarding a second woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct. Deborah Ramirez, in a New Yorker article published on Sunday, alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself without her consent during a party at Yale University in the 1980s, when the two were students there.

She is calling for an FBI investigation into her accusation, which Kavanaugh has denied.

The hearing and the Trump-Rosenstein meeting are certain to have lasting implications for the Trump administration, as the future of both Trump’s Supreme Court pick and his deputy attorney general are on the line.

Jared Yates Sexton, a politics reporter for Slate, said he believes the Thursday meeting with Rosenstein is a “scheduled overload of the media.”

“Now Trump will meet with Rosenstein on Thursday regarding his position, coinciding with testimony about allegations of attempted rape against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh,” Sexton wrote on Twitter. “It’s a scheduled overload of the media, a strategy that’s served Trump well before.”

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