By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

24 February 2019 in the Wall Street Journal

Did law-enforcement officials plot to remove President Trump from office? Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggests they might have. In a recent interview, Mr. McCabe said that in May 2017 Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “raised the issue” of using the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office “and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort.” According to Mr. McCabe, Mr. Rosenstein was “counting votes or possible votes.”

Exactly what happened is unclear. A statement from Mr. Rosenstein’s office called Mr. McCabe’s account “inaccurate and factually incorrect” and asserted: “There is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.” But this is a potentially serious matter, and should be fully investigated.

The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, primarily to provide for the appointment of a new vice president when that office becomes vacant, as it did when Lyndon B. Johnson acceded after John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. It also contains a section creating a process whereby a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” can temporarily cede authority to the vice president, and one through which the vice president and a majority of “principal officers”—cabinet members—can sideline a president who is disabled but won’t acknowledge it.

It is that last provision that supposedly excited Mr. Rosenstein’s interest. Mr. McCabe said the idea came in a discussion of “why the president had insisted on firing the director [Mr. Comey] and whether or not he was thinking about the Russia investigation.” To prevent interference with that probe, Mr. McCabe said, he opened new counterintelligence and criminal investigations of the president in May 2017, both of which were shortly subsumed into the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller, whom Mr. Rosenstein appointed.  Read more »