Two of Donald Trump’s cabinet members were “ready to support” efforts to have him impeached after he fired former FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, according to an explosive revelation provided by former FBI lawyers during a closed-door testimony, reports Fox News .
James Baker, one of the lawyers, told the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees that he was told Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, had said two of Trump’s cabinet officials were ready to support invoking the 25th Amendment.
“I was being told by some combination of Andy McCabe and Lisa Page, that, in a conversation with the Deputy Attorney General, he had stated that he — this was what was related to me — that he had at least two members of the president’s Cabinet who were ready to support, I guess you would call it, an action under the 25th Amendment,” Baker reportedly said.
Another lawyer, Sally Moyer, also told the committees that, while she was not in the room to be able to directly attribute any remarks to Rosenstein, she had heard of the discussion in which the idea of taping Donald Trump was raised. While Rosenstein himself has denied ever having “pursued or authorized recording the president,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told CBS’ 60 Minutes this week that the suggestion was taken so seriously that it was brought to the lawyers at the FBI, according to Bloomberg .
Andrew McCabe, who took over the FBI after Trump fired James Comey, is the first official to confirm anonymous reports that officials talked about using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. https://t.co/TrZGIEYgPK
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) February 17, 2019
Despite denial by the Justice Department, the sworn testimonies of the former FBI lawyers show that the DOJ was actively looking to explore whether Donald Trump’s administration would be open to the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment. As reported by the Independent , section four of the amendment allows the removal of a sitting U.S. president if the vice-president and a majority of the Cabinet declare them “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It is not clear at this point who those two cabinet officials were.
The release of the two depositions by former FBI lawyers in front of the House committees points towards an attempt to have Trump impeached. Insinuations from within the DOJ have suggested that having someone wear a wire near Trump was an idea steeped in sarcasm, but both McCabe and the former FBI lawyers said they took it seriously.
“I took it seriously because my assessment was they took it seriously,” Baker said. “This was not a joking sort of time. This was pretty dark.”
Sally Moyer echoed Baker’s testimony, adding that the DOJ meant business at the time.
“It was more of a ‘Can you believe the world we are living in now?’” she told the committee back in October.
