Interesting references in Rosensteins' resignation letter.
He quoted 3 people:
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Attorney General Robert Jackson. Jackson was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
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Edward Levi. Levi was attorney general under Ford, and credited with re-establishing law and order following Watergate.
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John Ashcroft. Although Ashcroft has a mixed history, at best (promoting the Patriot Act, for example), this is notable from Wikipedia:
"In March 2004, the Justice Department under Ashcroft ruled that the Stellar Wind domestic intelligence program was illegal. The day after the ruling, Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. President Bush sent his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. to Ashcroft's hospital bed. They wanted him to sign a document reversing the Justice Department's ruling. The semi-conscious Ashcroft refused to sign; Acting Attorney General James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel for DOJ, were there to back him up.[22] FBI Director Robert Mueller, who also was rushing to the hospital, spoke by phone to Ashcroft's security detail, ordering them not to allow Card or Gonzales to have Comey removed from the hospital room."
Interdasting.
Stellar Wind was "the code name of a warrantless surveillance program begun under the George W. Bush administration …"
"The program's activities involved data mining of a large database of the communications of American citizens, including e-mail communications, telephone conversations, financial transactions, and internet activity. William Binney, a retired technical leader with the NSA, discussed some of the architectural and operational elements of the program at the 2012 Chaos Communication Congress.
The intelligence community also was able to obtain from the U.S. Treasury Department suspicious activity reports, or "SARS", which are reports of activities such as large cash transactions that are submitted by financial institutions under anti-money laundering rules.
There were internal disputes within the U.S. Justice Department about the legality of the program, because data is collected for large numbers of people, not just the subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants. During the Bush Administration, the Stellar Wind cases were referred to by FBI agents as "pizza cases" because many seemingly suspicious cases turned out to be food takeout orders. According to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, approximately 99% of the cases led nowhere, but "it's that other 1% that we've got to be concerned about"."
All the above from Wiki.
Interesting choice of 3 men to quote in that RR letter …