The New York Times Friday reported the following. I urge you to use caution with this and consider the sources, which appear to be, well, the New York Times, and various officials hostile to President Trump, like former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
According to the Times report:
The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit.
Mr. Rosenstein made the remarks about secretly recording Mr. Trump and about the 25th Amendment in meetings and conversations with other Justice Department and F.B.I. officials. Several people described the episodes in interviews over the past several months, insisting on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The people were briefed either on the events themselves or on memos written by F.B.I. officials, including Andrew G. McCabe, then the acting bureau director, that documented Mr. Rosenstein’s actions and comments.
None of Mr. Rosenstein’s proposals apparently came to fruition. It is not clear how determined he was about seeing them through, though he did tell Mr. McCabe that he might be able to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John F. Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security and now the White House chief of staff, to mount an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment.
Rosenstein flatly denies the story. The Justice Department provided an anonymous source who said they were at the meeting and that Rosenstein mentioned a wiretap but was only being sarcastic. What’s more, the Times appears to not be relying directly on anyone who was at the meeting – other than the denials.
In his radio program Friday night, Mark Levin poses an excellent theory about what is going on here. Levin, a former chief of staff at the Justice Department, says he is being told that Rosenstein never seriously contemplated such things. Levin believes enemies of the president are trying to anger him into firing Rosenstein and provoke a crisis that could hand Democrats the Congress and sink the Kavanaugh nomination.
Makes sense to me. A sudden Constitutional crisis. New charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Justice by Trump. Questions raised anew about whether Kavanaugh loves executive power and would act to protect Trump.
Conservatives, and the White House, would be wise to be careful before falling into what could be a trap.