In the wake of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump was considered mentally unfit for office — by people closest to him.
That's the view of ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl, the author of the Trump exposé "Tired of Winning," who discussed the matter on MSNBC's "The ReidOut" Tuesday evening.
"You have covered Donald Trump a long time. Talk about his mental state," said anchor Joy Reid. "You write about the fact that Mike Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, at some point discussed the 25th Amendment regarding Trump, that Mitch McConnell spearheaded a move to ban him from the inauguration. He threatened to run as a third-party candidate and had to be threatened not to do it. The 25th Amendment piece stands out to me. As your reporting would suggest, is Donald Trump fully there mentally?"
"I can't really make that judgment, but what I can tell you is people who have raised questions about whether or not he is fully there mentally have been the people closest to him," said Karl. "The people that have raised the alarms about what it would be if he came back are the people who are closest to him. And yes, in those hours after the January 6th attack, as they watched what he did and what he didn't do, while the United States Capitol was under assault by his own supporters, it was the people that were closest to him that were talking about whether or not they needed to remove him from office because he was mentally unstable, mentally unable to carry out the duties of the president."
"That is Pompeo and Mnuchin," Karl continued. "They had both denied it. There is sworn testimony acknowledging that those conversations did happen. They didn't go very far. They didn't have time to go far. Frankly, as you started to have people resign from the Cabinet, there were fewer people who would have voted for it. They were talking about it. It's not just those 25th Amendment conversations. I mean, you read that statement from an anonymous staffer. I think it's a very important statement. This was something that was given to me by the person who wrote it. He wrote it right after all the details came out about the classified documents. This is a very senior official who spent day in and day out with Donald Trump for over a year in the West Wing."
"I can't get any further details to who it was, but there was a lot of attention about Anonymous and we later learned it was Miles Taylor, who worked at the Department of Homeland Security," said Karl. "This is somebody who is more senior and spent a lot more time around Donald Trump who said those words about him, because he saw first-hand how he had operated and was conveying this to me. Didn't want to go public. Worried about the retribution we just talked about. This is somebody who has not been out there publicly taking on the president. Worried about retribution against the family, but deeply concerned about what a second Trump White House would look like."
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