Free Republic

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 these suggestions in the spring of 2017 when Mr. Trump’s firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director plunged the White House into turmoil. Over the ensuing days, the president divulged classified intelligence to Russians in the Oval Office, and revelations emerged that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey to...

A bombshell newspaper essay which detailed efforts to sideline Donald Trump from government was “just an obvious attempt to distract attention from this booming economy and [the president’s] record of success”, Vice-President Mike Pence has said. Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation in an interview for broadcast on Sunday, Pence also denied that White House officials discussed invoking the 25th amendment and removing Trump from power. The comment piece was published by the New York Times on Wednesday, under the title I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration and attributed to a mystery “senior official”. It came...

The US Constitution provides instructions for how to remove a president from office if they are unfit to do their job—gravely wounded, for example, or mentally unstable. The instructions were ratified as an amendment in 1967, after John F. Kennedy's assassination. Until that point, the Constitution just vaguely referred to the fact that a president could be removed for "Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of said Office." When can the 25th amendment be invoked for an unfit president? Whenever the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet are ready to do so. One anonymous "senior official" wrote...

WASHINGTON – A storm is gathering. The voices raising alarms about President Donald Trump’s temperament, steadiness and attitude toward the competing power centers of a democracy aren’t new; they date to his days as Candidate Trump. But the new authors of those arguments are making those concerns louder and more credible. The consequences ahead – the speed and direction of the storm – aren’t set, at least not yet. But the stakes are already pretty clear, and they could include Trump’s presidency. Consider just the past week. Last Saturday, two former presidents, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush,...

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, seizing on an explosive op-ed from an anonymous administration official, said Thursday that it's time to use constitutional powers to remove President Donald Trump office if top officials don't think he can do the job. "If senior administration officials think the President of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment," Warren told CNN. "The Constitution provides for a procedure whenever the Vice President and senior officials think the President can't do his job. It does not provide that senior officials go around the President -- take...

Wednesday on the radio, Dan Bongino subbed for LevinTV host Mark Levin and discussed a New York Times op-ed by an anonymous author. The article is purportedly by a “senior official” in the Trump administration who has “vowed to thwart” parts of Trump’s agenda. Bongino called out the unnamed author as a “coward” and a “chump” for resisting Trump, which really means resisting the American voters who put Trump in office. “When you object to the peaceful transition of power, the republic is finished,” Bongino said. “What else is left? Bongino said that the author has a duty to resign...

Fox News host Tucker Carlson started his show Wednesday night claiming he had a “pretty good idea who wrote” the controversial anonymous New York Times op-ed and added that representatives from his show had called the White House for comment. Earlier in the day, The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed that was allegedly written by a “senior official in the Trump administration.” “We think we’ve got a pretty good idea who wrote this piece. We’ve called the White House for comment on it tonight. But until we confirm the identity, of course, we’re not going to accuse anybody...

The New York Times’ scathing anti-Donald Trump op-ed, which the paper attributed to “a senior official in the Trump administration,” has inspired a parlor game among people trying to figure out the author’s name. Some online commentators are leaning toward Vice President Mike Pence based on just one word in the piece. The unidentified author singles out the late Arizona Sen. John McCain as “a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue.” The word ― which Merriam-Webster defines as either “a star that leads or guides” or a person who “serves as an inspiration, model, or...

The New York Times op-ed page editor Jim Dao on Wednesday described the process behind publishing a bombshell op-ed from an anonymous senior administration official, telling CNN that the official contacted him “through an intermediary.” Dao said the Times also spoke directly with the individual but there are only a "very small number of people within the Times who know this person's identity.” The op-ed, published Wednesday afternoon, described coordinated efforts among Trump administration staff to counter President Trump. The Times described the anonymous author in a note as "a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known...

If the “senior official” who published an anonymous op-ed bashing President Donald Trump in the New York Times on Wednesday was hoping for accolades from the opposition, he or she must have been sorely disappointed, as the media’s leftists and Never Trumpers accused the author of cowardice for failing to take the extra step of removing Trump altogether. The author claimed to be part of the “resistance” inside the White House. But the real “resistance” wasn’t having it. Jessica Roy, an anti-Trump writer at the Los Angeles Times, attacked the author in an op-ed titled, “No, anonymous Trump official, you’re...

Acts of sabotage against the president are perilous to the American system of government. They're also self-serving. The title of Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, contains a multitude of meanings. For one thing, it describes the attitude of many of President Trump’s own aides toward his judgment. It’s not just that many sources were willing to tell Woodward damaging stories about Trump: The most stunning examples are those where top aides reportedly thwarted his will. Even more stunning is an anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times Wednesday afternoon written by a purported “senior official in the Trump administration.”...

Even before his term of office expired at noon on January 20, 2001, President William Jefferson Clinton was quietly querying friendly members of the U.S. Supreme Court to see if they would be inclined to rule that the 25th Amendment prevented a president from serving more than two terms in the White House, or if there might be five justices on the high court who could be legally persuaded that the 25th Amendment didn't exclude the president from serving more than two terms, only that it prevented him from serving more than two consecutive terms. If the Justices could be...