Acting FBI Director McCabe was serious about using 25th Amendment to remove Trump?

John Solomon:
Don’t tell former FBI general counsel James Baker that those now-infamous discussions about secretly recording President Trump and using the tapes to remove him from office were a joke.

He apparently doesn’t believe it. And he held quite the vantage point — he was on the inside of the bureau’s leadership in May 2017, when the discussions occurred.

Baker told Congress last week that his boss — then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe — was dead serious about the idea of surreptitiously recording the 45th president and using the evidence to make the case that Trump should be removed from office, according to my sources.

Baker told lawmakers he wasn’t in the meeting McCabe had with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in which the subject came up. But he did have firsthand conversations with McCabe and the FBI lawyer assigned to McCabe, Lisa Page, about the issue.

“As far as Baker was concerned, this was a real plan being discussed,” said a source directly familiar with the congressional investigation. “It was no laughing matter for the FBI.”
...

But even more so, Baker’s story lays bare an extraordinary conversation in which at least some senior FBI officials thought it within their purview to try to capture the president on tape and then go to the president’s own Cabinet secretaries, hoping to persuade the senior leaders of the administration to remove the president from power.

Even more extraordinary is the timing of such discussions: They occurred, according to Baker’s account, in the window around the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Could it be that the leaders of a wounded, stunned FBI were seeking retribution for their boss’s firing with a secret recording operation?

I doubt this is the power that Congress intended to be exercised when it created the FBI a century ago, or the circumstances in which the authors of the 25th Amendment imagined a president’s removal could be engineered.

This wasn’t a president who was incapacitated at the time. He was fully exercising his powers — but in a way the FBI leadership did not like.

And that makes the FBI’s involvement in the tape-record-then-dump-Trump conversations overtly political — even if Rosenstein believed the whole idea was farcical.
...
This is Seven Days in May type stuff which shows that the FBI had gone rogue after Trump was elected.   McCabe may find himself on trial for more than not telling the whole truth to the IG.  It will also be interesting to hear Rosenstein's side of the conversation.

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