Well, well, poor old Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s senior Republican senator, has again changed his mind about Donald Trump and, as a result, he’s come up with a brand new conspiracy theory.
The same fellow who in 2016 said that the nomination of Donald Trump would destroy the Grand Old Party because Trump lacked the temperament to be president, now believes that as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee he is entirely justified in spending his time and taxpayer money investigating whether bigwigs at the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) ‘plotted’ to force Donald Trump from office.
Graham’s all upset because Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe revealed on CBS’ “60 Minutes” last night that DOJ officials, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, discussed the possibility of the Vice-President and members of the Trump Cabinet potentially debating the option of using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
Now, why on earth would anyone put the 25th Amendment and Trump in the same sentence?
Could it have been because of Trump’s wildly inappropriate relationship with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, an avowed foreign enemy that gleefully cyber-attacked the 2016 election?
It would seem so.
As McCabe told NPR’s “Morning Edition, "I don't know that we have ever seen in all of history an example of the number, the volume and the significance of the contacts between people in and around the president, his campaign, with our most serious, our existential international enemy - the government of Russia."
McCabe told 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelly that Trump chose to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin, not U.S. intelligence agencies when Putin assured Trump that North Korean nuclear missiles were not capable of destroying American cities.
According to McCabe, when American intelligence officials tried to tell Trump their reasons for disagreeing with Putin, Trump said, “I don’t care. I believe Putin!”
If the president’s evident willingness to side with a foreign enemy against U.S. intelligence agencies wasn’t enough, FBI and DOJ officials were also concerned about why Trump fired FBI Director James Comey after he refused Trump's request to stop the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's lying to the FBI.
Moreover, the FBI and DOJ wondered why Trump bragged to Russians in the oval office about how the firing of Comey would stop the Russia Investigation and then, in a nationally televised interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump admitted, “And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won."
For these reasons, according to McCabe, some in the FBI and the DOJ thought there were enough questions about Trump’s fitness for office for Mike Pence and members of the cabinet to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.
But the FBI and the DOJ never pushed the issue, and Pence and the cabinet never discussed the 25th Amendment.
Nevertheless, without a shred of evidence, Senator Graham is now crowing to the world that the DOJ and FBI ‘plotted’ to launch a ‘bureaucratic coup’ to remove Trump from office.
The problem with the honorable senator’s thinking, if that’s what he’s doing, is this: a coup is defined as “a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government” and that, dear reader, is not at all what McCabe or Rosenstein or anyone else was talking about.
They were talking about using the 25th Amendment, a perfectly legal constitutional remedy to respond to the aberrant behaviors of a presidential candidate, president-elect, and newly inaugurated president who had aligned himself with Vladimir Putin, the president of a foreign enemy.
Given that unpleasant reality, one wonders . . . why on earth would Lindsey Graham accuse the DOJ and the FBI of attempting to perpetrate a "bureaucratic coup" to force Donald Trump from office?
Huh?