Graham asks if McCabe 25th Amendment comments amount to ‘attempted bureaucratic coup’

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is vowing to “get to the bottom” of comments made by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe after the latter detailed conversations he had with other top officials about the possibility of removing President Trump from office via the 25th Amendment.

In an interview Sunday with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Graham questioned whether the former deputy FBI chief’s comments had revealed an “attempted bureaucratic coup” against the president.

{mosads}”It’s stunning to me that one of the chief law enforcement officers of the land, the acting head of the FBI, 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 said Sunday.

“We’re a democracy. People enforce the law. They can’t take it into their own hands. And was this an attempted bureaucratic coup? I don’t know. I don’t know who is telling the truth. I know Rosenstein vehemently denied it but we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he continued, referring to former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Sen. Lindsey Graham on alleged discussion of using 25th Amendment to remove President Trump: “We’re a democracy. People enforce the law. They can’t take it into their own hands. And was this an attempted bureaucratic coup? I don’t know. I don’t know who is telling the truth” pic.twitter.com/RNt9prdOOZ

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 17, 2019

Graham’s comments referred to an interview the former deputy FBI chief gave with CBS News’s “60 Minutes” program in which he explained that Justice Department officials met to discuss the possibility of removing Trump via the 25th Amendment, which allows a president’s advisers to declare them unfit for duty.

“Discussion of the 25th Amendment was simply … Rod [Rosenstein] raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort,” McCabe said during the interview.

The White House slammed McCabe’s credibility after the interview, accusing the former law enforcement official of harboring a “selfish and destructive agenda.”

“His selfish and destructive agenda drove him to open a completely baseless investigation into the president,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said last week. “Andrew McCabe has no credibility and is an embarrassment to the men and women of the FBI and our great country.”