From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, days after being named Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein was so alarmed

by what he was seeing inside the White House that he proposed a series of extreme measures.

Will those proposals now cost him his job? And new allegations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh?

It's Monday, September 24.

Mike Schmidt, where did this most recent investigation start for you?

This has taken months to work on. If not even more than that, my colleague Adam Goldman and I

set out to try and look at the period of time between when Jim Komey was fired in May of 2017

and when Bob Mueller was appointed as the special counsel to an eight day period of time.

What happened inside the Justice Department? How did Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General,

who was overseeing the Russian investigation, make the extraordinary and ultimately monumental decision

to appoint Bob Mueller as the special counsel?

And Mike, why did those eight days seem like an important period of time?

In a sense, it was the time that time forgot. It was incredibly important how they came to that decision.

But it ends with Mueller being appointed, so it often got overlooked.

And we never sort of turned around and looked back and said, okay, what happened after Komey was fired?

What did the FBI try and do? What was going through Rod Rosenstein's mind?

How did he come to a point, Mueller?

And Mike, why were you interested in Rod Rosenstein's role in all of this in particular during this

eight day period?

He was in this incredibly unique position because as part of the Komey firing, he wrote a memo

for the president that basically gave the rationale for it.

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