Was just talking about this with a friend. I honestly don't know how things will fall out. Consider: Rosenstein suggested this in Spring 2017. Several people were witnesses. None of them came running to the president to say "sir oh sir there's a rat in the palace!" Or if they did, the issue was not made public.

So he fires Rosenstein. He can't fire everybody who didn't stop Rosenstein. This is 15-month-old news; if he fires Rosenstein over it it lends credence to the "failing" NYT's story and suggests that the White House doesn't have the internal integrity to withstand suggestions of incompetence.

He will then have fired two attorneys general over threats to his position, not over procedure or competence. And we're 45 days to the election. Granted - firing Rosenstein will certainly keep Trump's name in the papers every day until then, which he likes. But 538 is already giving the Dems a 4-in-5 chance of winning the House (about what they gave Hillary of winning the presidency, so let's take that with a grain of salt).

Then there's the question of who replaces him. If Trump's thinking about it, he's certainly gotten people to start asking the question. And here's the meat: what do they want to do for a living? 'cuz the public remembers Bork for his funny name but the Dems remembered Bork for

On October 20, 1973, Solicitor General Bork was instrumental in the 'Saturday Night Massacre' when President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox following Cox's request for tapes of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon initially ordered U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order. Richardson's top deputy, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also considered the order "fundamentally wrong" and resigned, making Bork acting attorney general. When Nixon reiterated his order, Bork complied and fired Cox. In his posthumously published memoirs, Bork claimed Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court if he carried out the order, though Bork didn't take the offer seriously as he believed that Watergate had left Nixon too politically compromised to appoint another justice. Bork claimed he carried out the order under pressure from Nixon's attorneys and intended to resign immediately afterward, but was persuaded by Richardson and Ruckelshaus to stay on for the good of the Justice Department. Bork remained acting attorney general until the appointment of William B. Saxbe on January 4, 1974. Nixon would never get the chance to carry out his promise to Bork, as the next Supreme Court vacancy came after Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, with Ford instead nominating John Paul Stevens.

The Nixon white house was a lot less of a dumpster fire than the Trump white house is at this point. I dunno. Maybe Stephen Miller wants to be attorney general. But that, in and of itself, is an argument for the 25th Amendment.

I'm not ready to make any assumptions on this one.

Yeah. I don't understand why The Times reported it. There's a theory in the Twitter comments that it was a deliberate leak from inside the Trump administration to give him an excuse to fire Rosenstein