Senator vows inquiry into Trump- ouster talk
Graham fears ‘ bureaucratic coup’ plot
WASHINGTON — Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vowed Sunday to investigate whether the top officials at the Justice Department and the FBI plotted an “attempted bureaucratic coup” to remove President Donald Trump from office.
Graham, R- S. C., was reacting to an excerpt of an interview in which former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe confirmed an earlier New York Times report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had suggested wearing a wire in meetings with Trump and that Justice Department officials had discussed recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the Graham
25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
Rosenstein has disputed the account.
“There’s an allegation by the acting FBI director at the time that the deputy attorney general was basically trying to do an administrative coup, take the president down
[ through] the 25th Amendment process,” Graham said in an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation. “The deputy attorney general denies it. I promise your viewers the following: that we will have a hearing about who’s telling the truth, what actually happened.”
He added: “I’m going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of Department of Justice, FBI behavior toward President Trump and his campaign.”
Asked by the program’s host, Margaret Brennan, if he would subpoena McCabe and Rosenstein to testify, Graham said, “How can I not if that’s what it takes?”
The 25th Amendment establishes the process for the Cabinet to force the president’s removal if he is unable to perform his duties.
In McCabe’s interview, which aired Sunday evening on the CBS program 60 Minutes, the former FBI official said that a “crime may have been committed” when Trump fired the head of the bureau and tried to publicly undermine an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.
McCabe also said the FBI had good reason to open a counter intelligence investigation into whether Trump was in league with Russia after the May 2017 firing of then- FBI Director James Comey.
McCabe said he and others were “concerned about a national security threat.”
Rosenstein was “counting votes or possible votes” among Cabinet members on whether to oust Trump, McCabe told CBS’ Scott Pelley.
“And the idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the
director of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia’s malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, ‘ Why would a president of the United States do that?’” McCabe said.
He added: “So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?”
Asked whether Rosenstein was on board with the obstruction and counterintelligence investigations, McCabe replied, “Absolutely.”
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment Sunday night.
McCabe also revealed that when Trump told Rosenstein to put in writing his concerns with Comey — a document the White House initially held up as justification for his firing — the president explicitly asked the Justice Department official to reference Russia in the memo. Rosenstein did not want to, McCabe said, and the memo that was made public upon Comey’s dismissal did not mention Russia and focused instead on Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation.
“He explained to the president that he did not need Russia in his memo,” McCabe said. “And the president responded, ‘ I understand that, I am asking you to put Russia in the memo anyway.’”
Trump said in a TV interview days after Comey’s firing that he was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he fired Comey.
In the interview Sunday, McCabe also said Rosenstein in the days after Comey’s firing had proposed wearing a wire to secretly record the president. McCabe said he took the remark seriously, though the Justice Department — responding last September to a New York Times report that first revealed the conversation — issued a statement from an unnamed official who was in the room and interpreted the remark as sarcastic.
McCabe said the remark was made during a conversation about why Trump had fired Comey.
“And in the context of that conversation, the deputy attorney general offered to wear a wire into the White House. He said, ‘ I never get searched when I go into the White House. I could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn’t know it was there,’” McCabe said.
A Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, agreed with Graham that McCabe’s remarks “deserve scrutiny.” But he took issue with Graham’s characterization of the situation.
“I don’t think that this frankly rises to the level of some deep- state conspiracy or a serious attempt at what Sen. Graham called an ‘ administrative coup,’” said Coons, also speaking on Face the Nation. “I suspect that once this is fully discussed, it’ll be clearer that this was a brief or passing conversation that’s been taken out of context.”
McCabe’s spokesman said in a statement Friday that he did not participate in any “extended discussions” about using the 25th Amendment, nor was he aware of any.
On Sunday, Graham described the issue as one of national concern.
McCabe “went on national television and he made an accusation that floors me. … We’re going to find out what happened here, and the only way I know to find out is to call the people in under oath and find out, through questioning, who’s telling the truth, because the underlying accusation is beyond stunning,” the senator said.
McCabe was fired by Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, on the eve of his retirement in March 2018, after being accused of a lack of candor. The 60 Minutes interview was part of a book tour to promote his memoir, which will be released this week.
Information for this article was contributed by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times; Felicia Sonmez and Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post; and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press.