Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President
Donald Trump last year at time when the
White House had been plunged into chaos after the firing of FBI Director
James Comey, according to a New York Times report Friday.
According to the report, which Rosenstein strongly denied Friday, the deputy attorney general also suggested wearing a wire during encounters with the president while proposing the recruitment of other administration officials to support the president's removal.
“The New York Times’s story is inaccurate and factually incorrect,” Rosenstein said in a statement. “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.”
The report comes after an opinion piece, authored by an unnamed Trump administration official, was published earlier this month in the New York Times saying that Cabinet members had "whispered" about invoking the 25th Amendment because of Trump's increasing erratic behavior.
In Friday's report, the newspaper cited unidentified sources briefed on meetings involving Rosenstein and notes memorializing the discussions drafted by then acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
McCabe, who was dismissed earlier this year by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has shared private memos that he authored from his time at the bureau with Russia special counsel Robert Mueller.
In a statement Friday, McCabe’s attorneys said they did not know how the contents of the memos were shared with reporters.
“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,” McCabe’s attorneys said.
“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."