Republican Senator and chairman of the US Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham has vowed to investigate whether Justice Department officials and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have staged a "bureaucratic coup attempt" to remove US President Donald Trump from office.
"I'm going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of Department of Justice, FBI behavior toward President Trump and his campaign," Graham told CBS.
Graham was responding to an interview by the former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe on the program Sixty Minutes, in which he confirmed a New York Times report that US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had proposed to wear a wire in his next meeting with Trump and Department of Justice officials discussed recruiting members from the president's administration to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
Graham said he would call McCabe and Rosenstein if necessary.
During his interview, McCabe said government officials were alarmed by Trump's dismissal of former FBI director James Comey from office in May 2017, prompting them to consider using this constitutional clause to remove Trump.
McCabe, who served as acting director of the FBI after Comey's dismissal ordered an FBI team to investigate possible Russian interference in the last presidential election to determine whether Trump had obstructed justice in his decision to fire Comey.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice called McCabe's claims as inaccurate, and that Rosenstein didn't record any interviews with Trump.
The White House said McCabe was fired because he had lied to investigators several times, saying he had a selfish agenda that had led him to open a groundless investigation of the president. (QNA)
