Prez plotters must face punishment
That Justice Department officials were having discussions about ousting a sitting president should concern every American. It is simply astonishing that these actors allegedly held conversations around the notion of seizing power from the elected head of the executive branch.
Obviously, heads should roll, but really such a plot should result in criminal prosecutions with all the high-profile force that was used to arrest Roger Stone.
The new revelations come to us care of former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe, who has written a book and is shilling it on “60 Minutes.” The interview will air in full on Sunday, but the tidbits that have been released in advance are already damning.
According to CBS’ Scott Pelley, the reporter who interviewed McCabe, after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, McCabe jumped into action with other members of the Justice Department. McCabe was alarmed that Trump “might have won the White House with the aid of the government of Russia.” The next day, he brought the investigators together for a meeting.
“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Pelley said.
“I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and just won the election for the presidency,” McCabe told CBS. “And who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage, and that was something that troubled me greatly.”
The arrogance is astounding. According to Pelley, McCabe noted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein offered to wear a wire in order to record conversations with President Trump, and the idea was discussed on several occasions. It was “so serious that he took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss it,” Pelley explained on “CBS This Morning.”
It was at this time that Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate whether Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russians interfering in the 2016 election.
This is one tight circle of Washington, D.C., Justice Department brass and G-men. And they’ve succeeded in hampering a sitting president using their power because they were “troubled” by him.
These men must face consequences for their actions. Thankfully a purge has begun. As we know, Director Comey was fired, as was Deputy Director McCabe, and Peter Strzok, an FBI senior counterintelligence agent, a onetime member of Mueller’s team. Add to that Lisa Page, who was also on the Mueller team, and Bruce Ohr, who was stripped of his title as associate deputy attorney general.
Page had been texting antiTrump messages back and forth with Strzok, and Ohr had been in contact with the authors of the Steele dossier shortly after the election. In fact, Ohr is married to Nellie Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that hired ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to compile the infamous dossier.
And this is just a partial list. Americans need to know the entire story. If, as it appears, there was an effort to sabotage a presidency and create elaborate distractions and cover-ups using the powers entrusted to them, members of the U.S. government have involved themselves in a criminal conspiracy that dwarfs Watergate.