Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thursday cited a 2018 letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, about the need to "follow established policies and procedures" hours after the Justice Department said that ex-FBI Director James Comey had not done so regarding memos about private conversations with President Donald Trump.
"It is important . . . to follow established policies and procedures, especially when the stakes are high," Rosenstein's tweet said, quoting from a June 27, 2018, letter to Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"We should be most on guard when we believe that our own uncomfortable . . . circumstances justify ignoring . . . principles respected by our predecessors."
Rosenstein, 54, who resigned in May after the Russia investigation ended, wrote a memo that Trump cited in firing Comey in May 2017.
The Justice Department's inspector general announced earlier Thursday that Comey violated FBI policies in handling the memos on his Trump conversations before he was terminated.
Comey broke agency rules, the IG said, by giving one memo containing unclassified information to a friend with instructions to share the contents with a reporter from The New York Times.
He also failed to notify the FBI after he was dismissed that he had retained some of the memos in a safe at home, the report said.
Rosenstein also slapped back at two TV pundits for their conclusions on the inspector general's report.
He bashed CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti for attacking him for standing "silently" beside Attorney General William Barr "when he misled the public about Trump."
Rosenstein's tweet said: "Notice how this pundit completely misses the point and thereby illustrates it."
He later hit back at former Justice Department spokesman and now MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller, who argued in a July 2016 op-ed in The Washington Post that Comey "did what he did because the president was actively trying to dismantle DOJ's normal way of operating."
However, Rosenstein retorted that "many employees dislike supervisors, but most keep faith with government institutions."