If Trump administration officials believe the president cannot fulfill his duties, they have an obligation to invoke the 25th Amendment, 2020 hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told reporters after a campaign rally Sunday in Las Vegas.
She was commenting on former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe's claim in a "60 Minutes" interview that then-acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had considered the idea, the Nevada Independent reported.
McCabe, referring to the days after Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, claimed Rosenstein was concerned about the president's "capacity and about his intent at that point in time."
Warren emphasized that the Constitution requires administration officials to act.
"My point here is that if they believe that Donald Trump cannot fulfill the obligations of his office, then they have a constitutional responsibility to invoke the 25th Amendment," she said. "Their loyalty under law is not to him personally. It is to the Constitution of the United States and to the people of United States."
In September, Warren made the same statement to CNN in response to an anonymous New York Times op-ed that the paper said was penned by a top administration official claiming Cabinet members considered invoking the 25th Amendment.
A McCabe spokeswoman said Friday the former FBI deputy director's comments have been taken out of context, insisting he never participated in talks to invoke the 25th Amendment.
Dershowitz: 'clearly an attempted coup'
Harvard emeritus law professor Alan Dershowitz told the Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson last Thursday that if McCabe's claims are true, there was "clearly an attempted coup d'etat."
"Any justice department official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution," he said.
Dershowitz explained the 25th Amendment was meant for a case of physical incapacity such as the stroke President Woodrow Wilson suffered at the end of his presidency in 1921.
Impeachment is the constitutional process set apart for removing a president, he noted.
"Trying to use the 25th Amendment to circumvent the impeachment provisions, or to circumvent an election," Dershowitz said, "is a despicable act of unconstitutional power-grabbing."
Tax the assets of the 'rich'
At the rally Sunday, the Nevada Independent reported, Warren railed against Wall Street, big corporations and government corruption.
She urged supporters to "think about what it would mean if we had a government that instead of working for the lobbyists, instead of working for a handful of billionaires, instead of kowtowing to the giant corporations and their executives, instead worked for the people."
"Everything we care about would be different," she said.
Warren declared the Trump administration "the most corrupt administration in living memory."
"But we've had problems in Washington for a long, long time, so how about some structural change?"
Warren called for Medicare-for-all and universal child care among other progressive policies.
She proposes paying for it, not through an income tax, but through a 2 percent tax on the wealth of Americans with more than $50 million in assets.
The Nevada Independent noted polls indicate the idea is favored by a majority of Americans.
“But just a 2 percent tax and we have the money to be able to pay for child care from zero to five, for early education, to bring down student loan debt, to make the investments in infrastructure and jobs right here in America,” Warren said.
"This is about everybody pays a fair share, and everybody gets an opportunity to build a real future."
The Independent noted there was no mention of Warren's dubious claims of Native American ancestry. The recent revelation that she wrote on a Texas bar registration in 1986 that her race was "American Indian" prompted a top editor at her hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe, to declare her candidacy doomed.