The White House said Trump fired Comey ‘based on the clear recommendations’ of the deputy attorney general’s memo – but that memo is already under attack

The man who wrote the memo providing Donald Trump with the rationale he used to fire FBI director James Comey is a career prosecutor with a reputation for being “honorable” and surprisingly nonpartisan – and he has only been working for the Trump administration for two weeks.

James Comey firing: FBI director's dismissal rocks Washington – live Read more

Rod Rosenstein, Trump’s deputy attorney general, was confirmed by the Senate in late April with overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans. He was praised as a trustworthy choice for a fraught position overseeing the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election – a role that the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had to recuse himself from after failing to disclose his meetings with Russia’s ambassador during the campaign.

On Tuesday, the White House announced that Trump had fired Comey “based on the clear recommendations” of Rosenstein and Sessions. The administration released a three-page memo from Rosenstein, dated that same day, that argued that Comey’s mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation had damaged the reputation of the FBI and the justice department, and that Comey’s refusal to say his choices had been wrong meant that he “cannot be expected to implement the necessary corrective actions”. Rosenstein’s memo stops just short of an explicitly stated recommendation to fire Comey.

But Rosenstein’s memo has already come under attack, including from one of the former justice department officials whose criticism of Comey Rosenstein used to bolster the case against the former FBI director.

Democrats and some Republican members of Congress have said that the timing of Comey’s firing raised questions about the independence of the FBI’s investigation of Russia’s election interference – which includes scrutiny of contacts between Russia and Trump’s associates.

Mark Warner, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, told NPR on Tuesday that he had “lost any confidence I might have had” in Rosenstein, whose “first official action was putting his name on that letter basically making what appeared to be bogus reasons [for] firing the FBI director”.

“This president firing an FBI director because of actions taken nine months ago? It doesn’t pass the smell test,” Warner said.

A former top justice department official cited in Rosenstein’s memo called the White House’s stated reasons for firing FBI director Jim Comey a “sham” – noting that Trump had formerly praised Comey for the exact choices later used to justify his dismissal.

Rosenstein “should realize that his correct assessment of those mistakes is now being used to justify [Comey’s] firing for a very different reason”, Donald Ayer, a deputy attorney general under George HW Bush, told reporters late on Tuesday night.

The White House leaned heavily on Rosenstein’s memo as the reason Comey had been abruptly fired. But Ayer, who joined dozens of former Department of Justice officials in signing a letter criticizing Comey’s break with precedent in the case, told reporters that these valid concerns did not appear to be the real reason for the FBI director’s dismissal.

“I view the firing based, it seems, entirely on Comey’s mishandling of the Clinton investigation by making various inappropriate public statements as a sham,” Ayer told BuzzFeed News in an email, comments he later confirmed to the Guardian. “At the time, Mr Trump was supportive of the most incorrect things that Comey did – editorializing about the facts of the then ended investigation and later announcing that the investigation had been reopened.”

Ayer declined to comment on what he believed the real reasons for Comey’s firing might be. He said he could not comment further since he was in Nepal and about to embark on a trek that would leave him without internet for a week. The justice department has not yet responded to a request for comment on Ayer’s remarks.

On Tuesday, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer told MSNBC that Rosenstein’s memo appeared to have borrowed elements from a Clinton campaign document highlighting the letter from former justice officials criticizing Comey’s choices. Karen Finney said the memo “cites some of the very same quotes” and called the similarities between the two “very ironic”.

Rosenstein’s memo argued that Comey overstepped his authority in the way that he handled the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s emails, and that his comments to the media, and his choice to make public the reopening of the Clinton investigation just two weeks before the election, had damaged the reputation and the credibility of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

A former Obama justice department official, Eric Columbus, argued on Twitter that the language of Rosenstein’s memo, especially the final paragraph, read as “highly negotiated”, and that the lack of an explicit call for Comey’s firing might have been made on purpose.

Perhaps, Columbus speculated, “Rosenstein felt he had to oblige his boss as long as he didn’t have to expressly say something he didn’t believe – ie that Comey should be fired now”.

After Comey’s firing, Democrats renewed calls for the appointment of an independent special prosecutor to oversee the Russia inquiry – an appointment that some Democrats had argued Rosenstein should have promised to make before he was confirmed to his current role on 25 April.

Rosenstein, who received bipartisan praise from a long career as a federal prosecutor and US attorney in Baltimore, had been viewed as a surprisingly non-political pick as Trump’s No 2 official in the justice department. Rosenstein served as US attorney under both presidents Bush and Obama, and was not a close confidante of Trump or Sessions.

“He doesn’t make any decisions that either are or appear to be political,” James Cole, who served for four years as Eric Holder’s deputy attorney general, said in March, in advance of Rosenstein’s confirmation hearing.

In February, the Baltimore Sun, Rosenstein’s hometown paper, called him an “honorable” public servant who was too good to sell his soul by taking a job in the Trump administration.

“Just don’t go there. Say no to President Trump,” a member of the Sun’s editorial board wrote in an open letter.

As a young Republican lawyer, Rosenstein was tapped to join Kenneth Starr’s independent Whitewater investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s real estate dealings. His supervisors in the justice department praised Rosenstein’s wisdom and discretion at handling public corruption cases even as a young lawyer.

One of the few Democrats who voted against confirming Rosenstein, Senator Richard Blumenthal, praised Rosenstein’s record but said he would not vote to confirm him unless he pledged in advance to appoint a special prosecutor, which Rosenstein would not do.

“The need for a special prosecutor is now crystal clear,” Blumenthal said on Tuesday night. “President Trump has catastrophically compromised the FBI’s investigation of his own White House’s ties to Russia. Not since Watergate have our legal systems been so threatened, and our faith in the independence and integrity of those systems so shaken. The only way to restore faith in a non-political, non-partisan FBI is to appoint an independent special prosecutor.”

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law who watched Rosenstein’s confirmation process closely, said that after Comey’s firing, “no matter how professional he is”, he now found it hard to see how Rosenstein could supervise the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

“He’s part of the administration. I don’t see how he could do it independently,” he said.