The House Judiciary Committee announced on Friday that it intends to subpoena memos from former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe detailing reported comments made by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in which he proposed secretly taping conversations with President Trump and initiating a process to remove the president by invoking the 25th Amendment.
“I intend to subpoena ‘McCabe Memos’ & all other docs that have been requested & not provided,” the committee tweeted Friday evening from its verified Twitter account.
The New York Times was the first to report Rosenstein’s comments, in which he reportedly sought to recruit Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House chief of staff John Kelly in an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment, which allows a majority vote by a president’s Cabinet to remove the president if they are deemed unfit for office.
{mosads}He reportedly made the comments amid the chaos surrounding the White House and Justice Department (DOJ) following Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.
“The New York Times’s story is inaccurate and factually incorrect,” Rosenstein said in a statement issued by the Justice Department. “I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda.”
“But let me be clear about this: Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment,” he added.
Michael Bromwich, an attorney for McCabe, said in a statement, “Andrew McCabe drafted memos to memorialize significant discussions he had with high level officials and preserved them so he would have an accurate, contemporaneous record of those discussions. When he was interviewed by the Special Counsel more than a year ago, he gave all of his memos — classified and unclassified — to the Special Counsel’s office. A set of those memos remained at the FBI at the time of his departure in late January 2018. He has no knowledge of how any member of the media obtained those memos.”
The Washington Post, however, reported Friday that the comments were made sarcastically.
The threat to subpoena the “McCabe memos” comes amid an ongoing feud between House Republicans and the DOJ, largely surrounding special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, and possible obstruction of justice by Trump.
Republicans allege that the probe is biased against the president and the FBI improperly used the so-called Steele dossier, which includes salacious allegations about Trump’s ties to Moscow, in applying for the warrant to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The national security community and DOJ have criticized the calls for declassification, saying that removing key redactions could compromise sources and methods.
The White House announced Monday that the president would instruct the DOJ to declassify a series of documents “at the request of a number of committees of Congress and for reasons of transparency.”
However, Trump tweeted Friday morning that he would delay the documents’ release, saying the DOJ “agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies’ called to ask not to release. Therefore, the Inspector General has been asked to review these documents on an expedited basis. I believe he will move quickly on this (and hopefully other things which he is looking at). In the end I can always declassify if it proves necessary.”