Weighs in

Rod Rosenstein weighs in on Trump-Cummings Baltimore exchange, sort of

By JOSH GERSTEIN

Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy U.S. attorney general and longtime chief federal prosecutor in Baltimore, is reacting to the high-profile, caustic comments by President Donald Trump about that city’s crime problems.

In response to a query from POLITICO, Rosenstein did not comment directly on Trump’s assertion that Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) is responsible for his city’s violence problem.

However, the ex-prosecutor did echo some of Trump’s message, arguing that Baltimore’s political leaders have fallen down on the job and the city’s voters have done little to hold them accountable.

“Local government is failing in Baltimore,” Rosenstein told POLITICO via email. “The best things the government can do to help people are to provide a more effective law enforcement system and a more effective education system.”

“They need to make the streets safe for law-abiding citizens and allow motivated students to leave failed schools and get a good education. That will only happen if voters hold elected local officials accountable for crime and education,” Rosenstein added. “People get the government they vote for. “

Pressed about Trump’s rhetoric — which many lawmakers have described as racist — and his description of Cummings’ Baltimore-based district as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” Rosenstein declined to comment. (Cummings, as a member of Congress, has no direct role in local police policies.)

While Rosenstein is best known for his decision to appoint Robert Mueller to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, Rosenstein also spent more than 11 years as the U.S. Attorney for Maryland, working from a Baltimore office and trying to keep violent crime in check in the city.

In addition to serving as the Senate-confirmed, chief federal prosecutor there from 2005 to 2017, Rosenstein spent four years as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Maryland in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Baltimore has experienced a surge in violence in recent years, with 309 homicides in 2018 and 199 so far this year, according to statistics compiled by the Baltimore Sun.

Rosenstein, who lives in Bethesda, has repeatedly lamented the rise in violent crime in Baltimore, tying the phenomenon to perceptions by police that political leaders did not want proactive law enforcement. (Cummings, as a member of Congress, has no direct role in local police policies.)

“It’s very painful to me. We have a crisis in violent crime in Baltimore,” Rosenstein said at a 2017 Senate hearing.

“The Baltimore City mayor admits that crime is ‘out of control.’ If that is true, people should be held accountable,” Rosenstein told an audience in Chicago that year. “Crime is not like the weather. If crime is out of control, it is because people failed to control it.”

(The mayor Rosenstein referenced, Catherine Pugh, resigned in May amid a scandal involving the University of Maryland hospital system’s purchases of a children’s book she wrote.)

In a speech last year in Florida, Rosenstein attributed the spike in homicides in Baltimore to a decision “to cut back on policing and prosecution.”

The longtime federal prosecutor has also argued that some measures implemented after police-involved shootings or allegations of discriminatory policing have led to police abandoning legitimate techniques to head off crime.

“We need to avoid these kind of wholesale remedies that result in officers refraining from doing what we need them to do because we need them to be confident that they can go out and engage with criminal suspects and keep people safe. And they need to know they’re going to have political support from their communities,” Rosenstein told a police conference in Los Angeles in February.

“In Baltimore and Chicago, literally hundreds of people lost their lives because of political decisions that resulted in police refraining from doing the good things that we need them to do,” he said.

In front of most of those audiences, Rosenstein also acknowledges abuses by some Baltimore police officers.

Just before he became deputy attorney general in 2017, Rosenstein’s office obtained a racketeering indictment of seven Baltimore police officers on the city’s Gun Trace Task Force. They were accused of stealing money, property and drugs from citizens.

“This is not about aggressive policing, it is about a criminal conspiracy,” Rosenstein said in a statement announcing the indictment. “Prosecuting criminals who work in police agencies is essential both to protect victims and to support the many honorable officers whose reputations they unfairly tarnish.”

All seven of those officers and an eighth officer charged later either pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial.