Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he briefly talked about using the 25th Amendment to remove former President Trump from power during a discussion with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot.
But Mnuchin, who served as Treasury secretary from the beginning of the Trump presidency to its end, said he did not seriously consider using the measure to remove Trump from office.
“It came up very briefly in our conversation,” Mnuchin told the Jan. 6 committee in his deposition, released on Tuesday. “We both believed that the best outcome was a normal transition of power, which was working, and neither one of us contemplated in any serious format the 25th Amendment.”
“The only research I did out of curiosity was I googled it,” Munchin said, adding, “I remember my general counsel asking me if we wanted him to do extensive research on it. I said, no, not at this point.”
The 25th Amendment allows the vice president to step in if the president has been declared unfit for office by the vice president and a majority of Cabinet officials. Several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle called for the invocation of the 25th Amendment following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Mnuchin and Pompeo’s discussion about the 25th Amendment had previously been reported by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in his book “Betrayal,” released last fall.
Karl said in an interview about the book that Pompeo “asked for a legal analysis of the 25th Amendment and how it would work” but dismissed the idea the next day upon realizing how difficult the process would be, as several members of the Cabinet announced their resignations after the Jan. 6 riot.