Jeffrey Toobin is CNN's chief legal analyst, but he seems to be clueless about the fact that the 25th Amendment can only be invoked when a president is either physically or mentally incapacitated. It was never intended to be used in case high level officials decided that they just didn't like a president.
Yet somehow Toobin allowed his obvious dislike for President Donald Trump to, well, trump any basic legal sense on his part on Monday's The Situation Room to declare that it was "patriotic" for FBI and DOJ officials to discuss Trump's removal from office via the 25th Amendment even though to do so would have been plainly unconstitutional.
First former NSA attorney Susan Hennessey stated that discussing the unconstitutional use the 25th Amendment by high level officials weren't "particularly good ideas."
Here was Blitzer and Hennessey (click "expand"):
BLITZER: He tweeted this, Susan, the president, about McCabe's interview on 60 Minutes, at least in part, he said this. "This was the illegal and treasonous insurance policy in full action." Were those discussions that Mccabe and Rosenstein, according to Mccabe, had, illegal and treasonous?
HENNESSEY: They weren't illegal and treasonous. They weren't particularly good ideas which is why they didn't actually happen. I think we need to take ourselves back to what the situation the Justice Department and FBI officials were facing in that moment. They were investigating Russian election interference. They'd seen an absolutely disturbing, bizarre, number of contacts with the campaign of the individual who would become president. They're interviewing Michael Flynn for his contacts with Russians and lies about those contacts. The President of the United States asked the FBI director to see his way to letting Flynn go, which the FBI believes is potentially obstruction of justice. Then the President actually fires the FBI director which they think might have been an effort to actually impede the Russia investigation. Itself, a national security issue, right? Sort of the obstruction is the collusion sort of theory. I think what we're seeing is they were panicked. They had never seen anything like this in the history of the United States. It goes to how overwhelmed they were in that moment. Whenever they talk about the 25th Amendment, none of the people in the room as reported have authority with regards to the 25th Amendment. It's not different than any of us sitting around and talking about the 25th Amendment, except in one way, these are people who are actually seeing the president up close in private, the way he is conducting himself. So, yes, it's shocking to hear that they were talking about this but it's not as shocking as the idea that they were concerned enough about the president's mental stability that they actually thought that this was a reasonable discussion to have. And that they thought that cabinet members might go along. I do think that is a pretty disturbing fact.
Yeah, the President fired the FBI director which until the moment he did so, the Democrats were demanding should happen.
And although Hennessey absurdly conflated not agreeing with the President with mental instability, she didn't take it to the next level of absurdity which was left to Toobin to perform:
I think the correct term is not treasonous, but patriotic. I mean, they're thinking about the national security of the united States. These are all career officials. These are not democratic political appointees. These are people whose job it is to care about the national security about the United States and, remember, all this evidence has only gotten stronger over the past two years. You know, Adam Schiff is now conducting an investigation to determine, in effect, if the president is a Russian asset. This remains a serious concern and there is much more evidence to support this idea. They didn't even know at the -- during 2016. All those discussions about Trump Tower and Moscow, I mean, the idea that they were treasonous is 180 degrees wrong.
So it's patriotic to consider an obviously unconstitutional use of the 25th Amendment to remove a president that Jeffrey Toobin and some high level officials didn't like? Perhaps CNN should bring their other legal analyst, Paul Callan, into such discussions to provide a note of sanity to counter Toobin's raging TDS which overrides any legal sensibilities he might have once had.
