Steve Mnuchin can't recall whether he talked to VP Mike Pence about removing Trump from power: J6 report

The testimony from former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin revealed that while there was a lot of press around the conversation he had with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the 25th Amendment, all Mnuchin said he really did was google it.

Testifying to the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress and the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, Mnuchin said that the conversation he had with Pompeo was brief and that there was no serious plotting around enacting the 25th, which would remove Trump from power.

"The only research I did out of curiosity was I googled it," he told the committee. "It came up. I remember my general counsel asking me if we wanted him to do extensive research on it. I said, no, not at this point."

He confessed that it came up in conversation with Pompeo but he said he "can't recall" the date or details. It conflicts with Jonathan Karl's book post-Trump presidency. In the text, Karl writes that Mnuchin talked to other members of the Cabinet about attempting to remove Trump from office by invoking the 25th Amendment. Among the Cabinet officials, Mnuchin spoke to that night was Secretary of State Pompeo."

Mnuchin said that Karl's book was "completely inaccurate," but admitted he talked to Karl "on background. When I told him — he asked about the 25th Amendment. I said that I was not going to make any comments on the 25th Amendment, that I didn't think it was appropriate in that format, and that he shouldn't take that as meaning that there were conversations or there weren't conversations. He also asked me whether I had a conversation separately with Secretary Pompeo and I answered I had spoken to Secretary Pompeo after January 6th, not referencing that I spoke to him about the 25th Amendment. So if he has that information from other people, I believe it's inaccurate."

Karl's book Betrayal was among the top New York Times bestsellers for its well-researched and detailed accounts of the final days of the Trump presidency.

When Mnuchin was asked if he spoke to the vice president about the 25th Amendment, he said "I don't recall." It seems if someone spoke to a vice president about removing the president from office it might stand out, but in Mnuchin's case, he simply couldn't recall.