department. sessions is already recused from this investigation. officials from the president on down blame rosenstein s decision for making the controversy over russia to only get worse. we ll learn soon whether mueller s investigation forces rosenstein to step aside. back to you. evan, thank you very much. let s bring inn errol lewis, sarah westwood and our cnn legal analyst. joey, let s start with you. rod rosenstein sent this standard with the interview with the a.p. earlier this month, he said if anything i did winds up being relevant to mueller s investigation, i will recuse. he wrote the letter on which the white house initially said that the president based his decision to fire comey. is this a question of when and not if now? it absolutely is. this is an investigation about
president trump is beefing up his legal team adding a veteran washington lawyer to his defense amid the expanding russian investigation. now on board attorney john dowd who once led the investigation into the pete rose betting scandal for major league baseball. this as cnn learns that tensions are rising at the justice department over the russia probe and deputy attorney general rod rosenstein. he s under new scrutiny and now may be forced to recuse himself from overseeing the probe for his role in the firing of former fbi director james comey. for the first time friday in a statement via twitter the president acknowledged he s being investigated for comey s firing and blaming rosenstein, for what he calls a witch hunt. the question is will the deputy attorney general be the second top official at the justice department to recuse himself in the russian investigation. evan peres has more.
down from that. he s upset with rosenstein, not only because rosenstein was one of the people who recommended, as you mentioned, that jeff sessions recuse himself which trump was very unhappy about, but he is the guy who appointed robert mueller. trump thinks that robert mueller is behind all of his problems now. i think it s obvious that donald trump himself is behind all these problems now. if he had not fired comey when he did and in the way he did and with what he said about it afterwards, he would not be facing right now possible obstruction of justice charges and an investigation. evan peres is reporting tensions now within the department of justice and, you know, we ve outlined the players here. i wonder one specific instance, one event is being pointed to as one of the routes here, when the attorney general learned of the appointment of bob mueller, sessions was at the white house, and he learned about it when
later found in the suv. authorities are working on the theory, this is coming from our justice correspondent, evan peres, sources told him the theory they re working on is once they were out of the community center, they were going to use that detonator and remote control to set off those explosives. now either that part of the plan didn t come together because they were out of range, too far away, it just didn t work, or maybe they didn t get around to it and abandoned. that s one of the mysteries here, one of the many questions that authorities have. still many, many days and weeks to come where they can piece this together. they are now slowly putting together all the pieces of the puzzle. at a minimum it show there s was planning involved, a device constructed with a remote control. john vause, thank you very much. we ll come back to you in a few minutes. obviously a traumatic day for the hundreds of people trapped inside the inland regional center as the gunmen
peres, and don lemon as well as sonny has tin. we have tom fuentes. he haven, to you first. what more can you tell us about this plan? it s unusual, right, embedding federal officers with local police? right it s usually done the other way around. usually you have local police embedded in task forces run by the feds n. this case, there is an effort to try to boost morale there, trying to get the homicide unit in the baltimore police department to realize they have got the support of the federal government here. the atf is also assigned ten agents from around the country to work with the baltimore police department s ceasefire units. these are this is a quluunit police officers working cases targeting about roughly 100, several dozen people who are on