FBI Director James B. Comey provides remarks on civil rights and law enforcement at the historic 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on May 25, 2016. Photo courtesy of the FBI.
Despite the outrage over revelations that high ranking members of the FBI had discussed using the 25th Amendment to remove the president, Margot Cleveland says the real scandal is, and always has been, the fake Trump Dossier and the way it and former FBI Director James Comey’s selective leaks were used to create the Mueller kangaroo court. She writes at The Federalist (abridged):
Last week when Andrew McCabe launched his Orange Man Bad tour, he stunned the public with claims that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein suggested using the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office. Reaction on the hill came quickly, with Sen. Lindsey Graham calling the claim “beyond stunning.”
Graham, the new chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, promised an investigation, telling CBS’s “Face the Nation”: “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 [using] the 25th Amendment process. 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.”
But the supposed consideration of the 25th Amendment shouldn’t be the focus of the outrage. After all, that amendment, which allows the vice president plus a “majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” to declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” is part of our constitutional system. Its stringent requirements for removing a president ensure it cannot be used to execute a soft coup by political opponents.
The true scandal is not the swirling gossip that Rosenstein mentioned the 25th Amendment, but what has been front and center for more than two years: It’s the dossier, stupid!
It’s the dossier, its funding, its creation, and its use. It’s the leaks, the sabotage by political appointees and career DOJ and FBI agents, the media’s complicity, and the triggering of a special counsel, all with the end goal of removing the duly elected president by pressuring Trump to resign or face impeachment.
The most significant leak, … came following Trump’s firing of Comey. After Trump terminated him, Comey gave several memoranda he had drafted while serving as the FBI director to a law professor friend. That friend then leaked the memos to The New York Times, in hopes of forcing the appointment of a special counsel.
Comey’s ploy worked, and the day after the Times ran the story, Rosenstein (who was in charge because of Session’s forced recusal) appointed Robert Mueller special counsel to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”
Mueller’s appointment helped cement the Russia collusion narrative in the public’s consciousness, but after nearly two years of stories, leaks, and fake news (such as the supposed meetings between Paul Manafort and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy), Mueller has yet to reveal any evidence of illegal coordination. So the soft coup that started with the DNC and Clinton-funded dossier will soon fail.
But the intelligence community’s attempt to undo an election and the media’s willing assistance in those efforts represent the most undemocratic abuse of power ever seen in our constitutional republic. That is the real scandal, not Rosenstein’s purported passing mention of the 25th Amendment.
Read more here.
