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Donald Trump and Ron Rosenstein to meet amid reports deputy attorney general expects to be fired

The fate of deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein – the man overseeing the independent investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia – is up in the air, after it was announced he will meet the president at the White House to discuss his future.

After a dramatic morning in Washington, riven with rumours and counter-rumours, Mr Trump confirmed he will speak to Mr Rosenstein on Thursday, when he returns to the capital from New York. That announcement followed a meeting at the White House between the deputy of the attorney general Jeff Sessions, and Mr Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly, at which Mr Rosenstein had expected to fired. From the White House, he spoke to Mr Trump by phone.

“I’m going to be meeting Rod Rosenstein when I get back to from all these meetings,” Mr Trump told reporters at the United Nations.

“We will be meeting at the White House and we will determine what’s going on. We want to have transparency. We want to have openness, and I look forward to meeting with Rod at that time.”

Earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Mr Rosenstein and Mr Trump had an extended conversation, at the deputy attorney general’s request, to discuss the recent news stories. “Because the president is at the UN, they will meet on Thursday when the President returns to Washington DC.”

The flurry of events appear to suggest that Mr Rosenstein will remain in his position at least for a few more days. On Monday morning, a succession of reports said he had resigned, that he was planning to resign, and then that he would refuse to resign. “He’s expecting to be fired,” a source told Axios.

The day chosen for the meeting may be significant; Thursday is also the day that Mr Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, and one of two women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There has been speculation for months about the future of Mr Rosenstein, who took on oversight of the Mueller probe after Mr Sessions recused himself. There have been suggestions the president wants to remove both men, possibly as a precursor to terminating Mr Mueller’s inquiry itself.

Speculation about Mr Rosenstein’s future grew over the weekend after it was reported by the New York Times he had last year suggested secretly recording the president to demonstrate chaos in the administration and raised the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. The Justice Department has said Mr Rosenstein was joking when he talked about taping the president.

He also denied the report. “The New York Times’s story is inaccurate and factually incorrect,” he said in a statement.

“I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda. But let me be clear about this: based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.”

In an interview that was recorded before Monday morning’s flurry of rumours and speculation, the president had left open the prospect that he might fire Mr Rosenstein.

“I don’t want to comment on it until I get all the facts,” Mr Trump said in an interview on Geraldo in Cleveland on WTAM radio in Cleveland that is set to air on Monday.

“I haven’t gotten all the facts, but certainly it’s being looked at in terms of what took place. If anything took place and I’ll make a determination sometime later, but I don’t have the facts.”

Some of Mr Trump’s allies urged him against firing Mr Rosenstein, suggesting he was in danger of walking into a trap.

Sean Hannity, a broadcaster with Fox News who is a strident supporter of the president and who has interviewed him frequently, told his viewers: “I have a message for the president tonight. Under zero circumstances should the president fire anybody.”

He said he had “multiple sources” confirming the president’s enemies were “hoping and praying” Mr Trump fired someone so they could turn it into a scandal.

“The president needs to know it is all a setup,” Mr Hannity said. “He needs to know that regardless of whether he steps in or not, and I would argue he should definitely not, the deep state tonight is crumbling from within at this very hour.”

The Times said in the case of Mr Rosenstein’s exit, Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, would assume oversight of the Russia investigation, according to a Justice Department official. The acting deputy attorney general would be Matthew Whitaker, the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.