On Thursday afternoon, a screenshot of a DOJ media advisory started floating around Twitter after being shared by Politico’s Eric Geller and several other journalists and attorneys.
According to the announcement, on Friday at 10 EDT, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and other law enforcement officials will hold a press conference for “a major cyber law enforcement announcement.” These other officials include people from the Treasury Dept., the FBI, and the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.
A lot of people on Twitter began demanding for more proof this was a legit image, so I dug around and found that a nearly identical announcement had gone out Thursday afternoon through the AP’s Washington daybook. The daybook is an advanced event list/schedule that the Associated Press provides to its affiliates and certain other news industry subscribers. The listing of this event on the daybook (which includes RSVP instructions and a DOJ contact for the press) means this Rosenstein announcement is most definitely a real press conference happening on Friday.
Later on Thursday afternoon, several AP affiliates which carried the Friday daybook updated their pages to include only President Trump’s schedule for March 23rd, removing the reference to the Rosenstein press conference. However, the original version of the daybook with the DOJ event is still available in cached google results for these websites.
You can read my Twitter timeline for all the links to the AP daybook and other proof, but yes, this is really happening.
The changes to the public daybook schedule and the lack of MSM pre-coverage indicates that the DOJ has put some sort of embargo on the press conference.The image being shared on Twitter likely came from an internal media advisory email sent by DOJ to press contacts, and the only outlet that has dared even mention it so far is Vox.
Given the secrecy and the fact that Rosenstein is leading the presser instead of Sessions, I think we could be getting another round of Russia indictments Friday morning. The inclusion of Treasury and SDNY (which has Wall St. in their jurisdiction) suggests there could be some RICO or money-laundering charges to go along with something Russia-related, like the DNC hack.
Don’t get your hopes up for anyone in Trump’s inner circle, but my money is on Guccifer 2.0, more foreign nationals, and maybe even Roger Stone. Get your popcorn ready!