Newly Released Documents Shed Light on Mueller-Trump Meeting

Former special counsel Robert Mueller had taken himself out of the running to be FBI director by the time he met with President Donald Trump about the job, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told federal investigators.

Notes from Rosenstein's May 23, 2017 interview were made public on Monday as the result of a court ruling in BuzzFeed News' Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department.

The document sheds new light on the circumstances of Trump's May 16, 2017, meeting with Mueller in the Oval Office, NBC News reported. Trump has claimed that Mueller applied for the suddenly vacant job of FBI director in that meeting and turned him down. The next day, Mueller was named special counsel investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In the interview, according to the notes published by BuzzFeed News, Rosenstein described feeling "angry, ashamed, horrified and embarrassed" at how the abrupt firing of then-FBI director James Comey on May 9, 2017 was handled. "It was also humiliating for Comey," his interviewers quoted Rosenstein as saying.

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