Elizabeth Warren to White House Officials: Stop 'Hiding' Behind Op-Eds and Remove Trump From Office
07 September 2018
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has a strong message for White House officials: Instead of warning the public about how deranged and dangerous President Donald Trump is through anonymous op-eds and "deep background" book interviews, take concrete action by invoking the 25th Amendment and removing him from office.
In a petition circulated late Thursday, Warren wrote, "If the presidential cabinet believes that President Trump is 'unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office' as the 25th Amendment states, then every minute they make excuses is a minute that our country is at risk."
"If senior officials believe the president is unfit," Warren added, "they should stop hiding behind anonymous op-eds and leaking information to Bob Woodward boasting that they're trying to save our country, and instead do what the Constitution demands they do: invoke the 25th Amendment and remove this president from office."
Warrens call for administration officials to act on their dire warnings comes just days after the publication of explosive excerpts from legendary journalist Bob Woodward's new book, largely based on sourcing he describes as "deep background" with first-hand witnesses to the events he describes, as well as an anonymous op-ed from a "senior official in the Trump administration" in the New York Times—both of which raised fresh questions about Trump's fitness for office.
According to Woodward, White House officials have devised a strategy of stealing documents from Trump's desk to prevent him from signing them and ignoring his impulsive demands, such as when he ordered Defense Secretary James Mattis to "fucking kill" Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The author of the anonymous Times op-ed—which has been roundly denounced by progressives and media critics as a purely self-interested effort to recast complicit White House officials as heroes—reinforced Woodward's account, claiming vaguely that "many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations."
In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Warren noted that the "Constitution provides for a procedure whenever the Vice President and senior officials think the president can't do his job," but it "does not provide that senior officials go around the President—take documents off his desk, write anonymous op-eds."
"What kind of a crisis do we have if senior officials believe that the president can't do his job and then refuse to follow the rules that have been laid down in the Constitution?" Warren asked. "They can't have it both ways. Either they think that the president is not capable of doing his job in which case they follow the rules in the Constitution, or they feel that the president is capable of doing his job, in which case they follow what the president tells them to do."