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Rod Rosenstein joined the Justice Department as a young lawyer in 1990, and he has worked there ever since. So he has had plenty of time to absorb the department’s internal culture.

That culture, created in the aftermath of Watergate, calls for department officials to be less partisan and more independent than members of any other cabinet department. They are supposed to follow the letter and spirit of the law, even when doing so makes life uncomfortable for the president or his appointees. They’re supposed to care, above all, about justice.

In Rosenstein’s tenure as the deputy attorney general, he failed to live up to the standard.

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