Trump allies knew he was 'mentally unfit to lead' on Jan. 6 -- but are now defending his actions: reporter

Some of the Republicans now defending Donald Trump's actions around the Jan. 6 insurrection were privately so worried about his state of mind that they considered removing him from office the day after the deadly riots.

ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl was on a team that reported Jan. 7 that at least two Cabinet members discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to prevent Trump from doing more damage before his presidency ended, but he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that some of those same officials now whitewashed the danger.

"There was such concern about Trump's state of mind that some of the people closest to him actually talked about invoking the 25th Amendment and declaring him mentally unfit for the office of the presidency," Karl said, "and that those discussions included [secretary of state] Mike Pompeo and [treasury secretary] Steven Mnuchin, two of the Cabinet secretaries that were closest to Donald Trump."

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In the year since the insurrection, investigators and reporters have turned up evidence that Trump's family members and closest advisers, including Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, were also concerned about his state of mind after the election.

"So now you see, it's not just Pompeo and Mnuchin, we saw the committee unveil those messages from Donald Trump Jr. absolutely at the end of his rope, begging [chief of staff] Mark Meadows to go in and get his father to stop it," Karl said, "and now we see Sean Hannity, who never revealed any of this publicly, but you see in these text messages that Hannity obviously was not simply a Fox News host, he was a top adviser, a close confidant of Donald Trump, and he was at the end of his rope. He was, again, begging Trump to get off of this, to stop the crazy talk of using Mike Pence to overturn the election, that it was going to cause the White House council's office to have lawyers resigning en masse, not just Pat Cipollone, but other lawyers in the council's office, and saying that Trump should never talk about the election again."

"That was the state you were in," Karl added. "The people absolutely closest to Donald Trump during these days, the people now defending him and holding him up, were saying, effectively, that he was mentally unfit to lead."

READ MORE: Here's the psychological problem that causes Trump supporters to keep getting duped

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