Cabinet Members Discussed Asking Trump to Resign After Jan. 6

(Bloomberg) -- In the days after the assault on the US Capitol, some members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet talked about asking him to resign or invoking the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove him from office, according to testimony released Friday night.

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Michael Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, told investigators for the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack that Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia approached him about trying to get the president to quit.

“His request of me was, would I be willing to support or participate in a cabinet meeting with the president?” Pompeo said, according to the deposition transcript.

Scalia wanted Trump to meet with the cabinet about the events of Jan. 6, Pompeo said, “implicitly, at least, if not directly, to ask him to think about resigning.”

“I thought the probability of that was low and that there was an awful lot of work to be done, Pompeo said, saying he considered the idea “not productive.”

The committee asked him whether he recalled a conversation with then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about invoking the 25th Amendment.

The amendment is triggered when the vice president and a majority of the cabinet declare a president unable to “discharge the powers and duties of his office.” If a president objects, it takes a vote of two-thirds of both the House and the Senate to relieve him of his job and elevate the vice president.

“I’m sure the words ‘25th Amendment’ came up in some conversations. I have no specific recollection of that. But it was never anything that I had a conversation with anyone that I can recall that was remotely serious,” Pompeo said.

On both counts, Pompeo told the committee he was never on board, and called the idea of Trump being removed forcibly “fanciful.”

Former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who is married to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, resigned after the Capitol assault. She denied being approached or having any discussions with other members of the cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment.

Chao said she conveyed her decision to resign to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who did not try to dissuade her.

Marc Short, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told the panel that he declined to patch through a call from Democratic leaders about invoking the 25th Amendment on January 7th.

Short said he felt the leaders, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were trying to make a play to the press and Pence’s staff didn’t think there was time to invoke it nor that Trump was mentally incapacitated, according to the transcript of his deposition.

Short said while some Cabinet members called Pence in the wake of January 6th, and some resigned, he doesn’t recall any recommending the 25th Amendment be invoked. “There was plenty in the press, but not in our office,” about invoking it, he said.

--With assistance from Flavia Krause-Jackson and Steven T. Dennis.

(Adds a contributor, and updates with Short, in final three paragraphs.)

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