Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Monday said they have never discussed invoking the 25th Amendment or heard of those discussions taking place inside the Trump administration.
“I have never heard anyone talk about it, whisper about it in any way,” Pompeo said Monday in response to a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment outlines how the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can remove the President from office if they determine that he “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Pompeo and Haley’s comments came days after The New York Times reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein privately raised the possibility of mounting an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment. His departure is now imminent in the wake of that report, which also said he floated the possibility of secretly recording Trump.
The Rosenstein report added fuel to the notion that many of the President’s top advisers view him as unfit to serve, with an anonymous editorial penned earlier this month by a senior administration official also claiming there had been whispers about the 25th Amendment within the administration.
Noting he has been a member of the Trump administration from the beginning, Pompeo insisted there has never been any discussion about the 25th Amendment and called the question “ludicrous.”
Haley said the notion that Cabinet members are discussing the 25th Amendment is “completely and totally absurd.”
“Literally, I have never once been in the White House where that conversation has happened. I am not aware of any Cabinet member talking about that. It is completely and totally absurd,” Haley said. “Nobody is questioning the President at all. If anything, we’re trying to keep up the pace with him in the fact that he has a lot that he wants to accomplish quickly.”