The chairman of the US Senate Judiciary Committee has vowed to investigate allegations that top FBI and justice department officials discussed ways to remove President Trump from office.
Senator Lindsey Graham pledged to issue subpoenas “if that’s what it takes”.
Ex-acting FBI chief Andrew McCabe said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had talks in 2017 about a constitutional clause that allows the removal of a president if deemed unfit.
Rosenstein has previously denied it.
The pledge by Graham, a Republican who has become one of the president’s biggest defenders, comes after McCabe appeared on US broadcaster CBS saying Rosenstein discussed the numbers needed to invoke the clause, the 25th Amendment to the US constitution.
In the 60 Minutes interview aired on Sunday, McCabe also said that the FBI “had reason to investigate” the president’s links with Russia, based on Trump’s actions.
The senator said that Rosenstein had been “absolutely serious” when he discussed secretly wearing a wire to record Trump, adding that Trump said Russian President Vladimir Putin had told him North Korea did not have the capability to hit the US with ballistic missiles – and, when US intelligence officials contradicted this assessment, responded with: “I don’t care. I believe Putin”
The White House said McCabe, who was fired last year for allegedly lying to government investigators, had “no credibility”.
The allegations that Rosenstein discussed invoking the amendment were first reported last year by the New York Times, which cited anonymous sources.
However, McCabe’s quotes are the first to be made on the record from someone present at the meeting where the alleged comments were reportedly made – in May 2017, after Trump fired FBI director James Comey, according to McCabe.
“The discussion of the 25th Amendment was simply [that] Rod raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort,” he said.
McCabe also said Rosenstein was openly “counting votes, or possible votes” and that he was “very concerned” about the president “his capacity and about his intent at that point in time.”
“To be fair, it was an unbelievably stressful time… it was really something that he kind of threw out in a very frenzied chaotic conversation about where we were and what we needed to do next.”
Rosenstein has previously strongly denied having such discussions, saying there was “no basis” to invoking the amendment.
However, Senator Graham said using the 25th Amendment would have amounted to “an administrative coup”.
“It’s stunning to me that one of the chief law enforcement officers of the land would go on national television and say, oh by the way I remember a conversation with the deputy attorney general about trying to find if we could replace the president under the 25th Amendment,” Graham told CBS.
“I think everybody in the country needs to know if it happened. I’m going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of Department of Justice [and] FBI behavior toward President Trump and his campaign.”
He pledged to hold a hearing at the Senate committee to determine “who’s telling the truth”.
