Rod Rosenstein could get sacked ‘very shortly’, says Steve Bannon

Steve Bannon, former White House advisor, said that he thinks Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will be sacked “very shortly”.

The former editor of right-wing news site Breitbart told the BBC that Mr Rosenstein will “either...take the direct order of [President Donald Trump] or I think Rosenstein will be fired”. His comment seemed to imply that Mr Trump would ask for the Department of Justice second-in-command’s resignation rather than sacking him.

Mr Rosenstein has been overseeing the FBI investigation, led by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, into whether the 2016 Trump campaign team allegedly colluded with Russian officials.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself of the matter due to his work for the campaign.

Public calls from Mr Rosenstein to fire Mr Mueller have increased of late as Mr Trump has repeatedly called the investigation a “witch hunt” and recently accused the FBI of implanting a confidential informant, a spy, in his campaign, possibly at the orders of someone in his predecessor Barack Obama’s administration.

However, Mr Bannon, who left the White House in August 2017, said Mr Mueller should not be fired and is an “honourable guy”.

“You know he's a combat Marine, you know he's served his country. I don't agree with everything that's been going on the special counsel but I think he's run it. I hope at some time he does issue the report. Rudy Giuliani says it's going to be some time in the fall,” Mr Bannon noted.

He also believed the president should not testify in the investigation since it should not “rise to that level,” but said he thinks Mr Trump should answer Mr Mueller’s questions “in writing”.

“By the way he's not above the law...In the Reagan, the Clinton and the Bush administration all had situations with this even in Nixon all had situations in this where you had a special counsel or special prosecutor. Okay, Trump unlike the others waived executive privilege immediately and shipped over 1.1 million documents and then made everybody in the White House go up and answer every question on Capitol Hill,” Mr Bannon stressed.

The long-ranging interview was Mr Bannon’s first with UK media and he spoke to the BBC from Prague, as part of his European speaking tour.

“I am not a politician. I’m a street fighter … I have no interest in being a politician,” Mr Bannon said, offering his views on everything political from immigration to race relations.

Mr Bannon said: “Mass illegal immigration is a scam of the globalists. … Because it is there to suppress the wages of the black and Hispanic working class by giving unlimited competition on labour”.

“Martin Luther King would be proud of him — what he’s done for the black and Hispanic community for jobs,” Mr Bannon said about the president.

He also called self-described white supremacists like Richard Spencer “cranks. The only reason they exist is because MSNBC and BBC is down there with a camera, giving them a platform. If you cut them off, nobody would ever hear from them”.