Rod Rosenstein Quotes
Derogatory information sometimes is disclosed in the course of criminal investigations and prosecutions, but we never release it gratuitously.
Rosenstein, Rod. "Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI." United States Department of Justice, 9 May 2017.
This was not the first time a beleaguered White House had believed a conspiracy existed. See Theodore Roosevelt’s quotation.
In most jurisdictions grand jury proceedings are secret. However it is common for the prosecutors to violate the law and leak the grand jury proceedings to bias the prospective jury pool towards a guilty verdict. Sometimes, the prosecutors will leak the proceedings to get headlines and news coverage.
He had been fired by the George W. Bush White House because he would not rush an indictment against a democratic politician to make the newspapers before the election that year. Unfortunately, many prosecutors will file a questionable case without sufficient evidence for a conviction. They get the newspaper headlines and TV coverage when they file the indictment, and little negative press when they person is found not guilty months or years later. The best prosecutors never will allow politics to influence their prosecution decisions, but there are still many who do.
Nixon was the ultimate pragmatist and used secrecy wherever he felt it might give him an advantage. His logic was that in the American system, the Judicial Branch was the only set of people who could pronounce something illegal. If the issue were secret, the judges could not see it, and therefore could never declare it illegal.
Many like Black were concerned that prosecutors had the power to decide who would be charged, with what crimes, what penalties to ask for, and even able to start or end investigations of private citizens and politicians. By overcharging they are able, if they choose, to intimidate many people into pleading guilty, even for crimes that the never committed, in order to avoid taking a chance and possible have a very long jail sentence. Thus they were the most powerful people in the legal system, and had more power and less accountability, checks and balances of any public figures except perhaps for Federal Judges.
Rod Jay Rosenstein is an American attorney who served as the 37th United States Deputy Attorney General from April 2017 until May 2019. Prior to his appointment, he served as a United States Attorney for the District of Maryland. At the time of his confirmation as Deputy Attorney General in April 2017, he was the nation's longest-serving U.S. Attorney. Rosenstein had also been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2007, but his nomination was never considered by the U.S. Senate.
