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Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham vowed on “Face the Nation” this weekend that he would hold a hearing to investigate former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s widely reported claim that high-ranking figures in the Justice Department, particularly Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, had discussed using the 25th Amendment to oust President Trump.

In an interview with “60 Minutes” last week promoting his new book, McCabe said he and Rosenstein seriously discussed potentially orchestrating a coup through the 25th Amendment, which empowers the Cabinet to remove a sitting president if he’s deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Rosenstein, he said, “offered to wear a wire into the White House” to catch Trump saying something disqualifying, a claim Rosenstein has dismissed as a sarcastic joke. “He was absolutely serious,” McCabe told “60 Minutes.” “And in fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had. I never actually considered taking him up on the offer. I did discuss it with my general counsel and my leadership team back at the FBI after he brought it up the first time.”

Calling McCabe’s claim that they were seriously discussing a quiet coup a “tremendous allegation,” “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Graham if he’s ever asked Rosenstein if the conversation ever actually happened.

Noting that Rosenstein’s “publicly denied it,” Graham stressed, “The whole point of Congress existing is to provide oversight of the executive branch. So through good reporting by ’60 Minutes,’ there’s an allegation by the acting FBI director at the time that the deputy attorney general was basically trying to do an administrative coup, take the president down by the 25th Amendment process. The deputy attorney general denies it.”

The South Carolina senator then made his vow to the audience: “So I promise your viewers the following; that we will have a hearing about who’s telling the truth, what actually happened. Mr. McCabe, you remember, was dismissed from the FBI for leaking information to the press. So you’ve got to remember the source here.”

Saying he believes the country “needs to know if it happened,” Graham said it was simply “stunning” that a leader of the FBI would proudly go on television and brag about the “attempted bureaucratic coup.”

“I don’t know who’s telling the truth,” he said. “I know Rosenstein vehemently denied it, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it. I do know there was a lot of monkey business about FISA warrants being issued against Carter Page, about dossiers coming from Russia that were unverified. Mr. Mueller is going to look at the Trump campaign as he should to see if they violated any laws during the 2016 election. And I’m going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of the Department of Justice FBI behavior toward President Trump and his campaign.”

Brennan responded by expressing concern that such an inquiry might be doing “some damage” to “the credibility of the FBI,” to which he fired back: “Quite the opposite. If it happened we need to clean it up. The FBI has gotten off track in the past. It’s one of the greatest organizations in the world. The Hoover years have proven to be pretty dark periods for the FBI. The latter part of the Hoover days where politicians were being blackmailed. There is no organization beyond scrutiny. There is no organization that can’t withstand scrutiny. And the FBI will come out stronger. But we’ve got to get to the bottom of it.”

WATCH:

President Trump has since responded to McCabe’s claims by calling for action against those involved.

“Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe,” Trump said in a series of tweets Monday morning. “He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught[.] There is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who had just elected a president who they really like and who has done a great job for them with the Military, Vets, Economy and so much more. This was the illegal and treasonous ‘insurance policy’ in full action!”

“This was an illegal coup attempt on the President of the United States,” he wrote, quoting Dan Bongino on “Fox and Friends.” “True!”

Former second-string 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, has reached a settlement deal with a group of NFL owners accused of conspiring together — and with President Donald Trump — to lock Kaepernick out of the league over his pre-game anti-racism protests.

CBS News reports that both Kaepernick and the NFL’s attorneys announced late Friday that they’d reached a deal, estimated to be in the high tens of millions.

“For the past several months, counsel for Mr. Kaepernick and Mr. Reid have engaged in an ongoing dialogue with representatives of the NFL,” the two parties said in a joint statement released Friday evening. “As a result of those discussions, the parties have decided to resolve the pending grievances. The resolution of this matter is subject to a confidentiality agreement so there will be no further comment by any party.”

All parties are prevented from revealing details of the settlement, by the settlement’s terms, but various news reports put the settlement between $60 million and $80 million split between the two players. Those reports are, of course, unconfirmed.

Kaepernick and his 49ers teammate, Eric Reid, filed a joint grievance against NFL owners under the terms of the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement back in October of 2017, alleging that they were “locked out” of open positions with NFL teams over their kneeling protests, held during the national anthem.

Kaepernick also claimed that the NFL owners had conspired together to deny him a plum league position until he agreed to stop protesting, and that league owners were responding directly to President Donald Trump’s universal condemnation of NFL players’ anti-racism demonstrations by ending Kaepernick’s official relationship with the NFL.

Kaepernick was unable to get another quarterback job after turning down a one-year extension on his contract from the 49ers; Reid, the first player to join Kaepernick’s protests, was unemployed during the 2016 and 2017 seasons, but signed with the Carolina Panthers midway through the 2017-2018 NFL season. Reid signed a three-year deal with the Panthers, CBS reports, earlier this week, for an estimated $22 million.

Kaepernick’s attorney, celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos, told ESPN that he predicts Kaepernick will now be welcomed into the league with open arms, and that Kaepernick believes he will end up on either the Carolina Panthers, like his former teammate Eric Reid, or that he could replace a retiring Tom Brady on the Patriots.

“I think you’re going to see within the next two weeks that somebody is going to step up and do the right thing, and you want me to predict who?” Geragos told the sports network. “Besides the Panthers, it would not surprise me if Bob Kraft makes a move.”

The Patriots are probably a longshot. The team has two backup quarterbacks already, both of whom trained under Brady, and have been waiting for their moment in the spotlight for years.

The Redskins reportedly considered adding Kaepernick to the roster late last season, after trying out two other formerly retired quarterbacks, but eventually passed on the opportunity. The Alliance of American Football, which is in its premiere season and looking for star power, offered Kaepernick a slot, according to NBC News, but Kaepernick turned the offer down after the AAF refused to meet his demand for a $20 million contract.

Presidential races never shape up the way you think they’re going to.

For instance, at this moment in time back in 2015, we were all talking about how Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio were going to be duking it out for the Republican nomination.

That being said, the official wisdom for the Democrat nomination in 2020 is that Joe Biden will be sucking up all the air in the establishment and Bernie Sanders will have solidified the socialist segment of the party, so the key is staking out a position somewhere on the not-quite-socialist identity politics left.

The problem is that’s a crowded market segment. Democrat Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand — all of whom fit in that political niche — have already declared their intentions to run. And then there’s Beto O’Rourke — an insanely rich, insanely privileged white guy the Democrats still seem to believe is an identity politics hero because he livestreams himself skateboarding an awful lot, or something — who will probably end up in the race, too.

How, then, to differentiate one’s brand in such a crowded field?

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Elizabeth Warren has called for an “ultra-millionaire tax” which is probably unconstitutional and a bad idea even if it weren’t.

Kamala Harris seems to be on board for doing something about legalizing marijuana at the national level, telling interviewers, according to Politico, that “it gives a lot of people joy. And we need more joy.”

Cory Booker has been talking about his vegan diet as if it were an actual campaign issue, even though he swears “whatever you eat is a very personal decision and everybody should what eat what they want to eat.”

So, taxing the heck out of the rich is taken. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have both taken plant advocacy off the table, albeit in very different ways. What’s left for Kirsten Gillibrand?

Well, how about endorsing the legal recognition of a third gender classification at the federal level?

2020 contender Kirsten Gillibrand backs third gender classification for Americans who identify as non-binary at federal level https://t.co/lSxUWtU9oi pic.twitter.com/iyUVLU3WI2

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 16, 2019

“New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a 2020 candidate, endorsed federal implementation of a third gender listing for Americans who identify as non-binary. Speaking at an LGBTQ-focused meet and greet in New Hampshire on Friday, Gillibrand emphatically said ‘yes’ about recognizing ‘X’ as a third gender marker,” CBS News reported.

“Palana Belken, a transgender woman and organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, asked Gillibrand the question and applauded her quick answer.”

The ball’s in your court now, Kamala.

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The “X” identification is currently available in a number of states as well as individual cities, but no move has been made to implement it on a federal level.

“Belken said her question originated from the efforts of New Hampshire State Rep. Gerri Cannon, a transgender lawmaker who recently introduced two similar identification bills at the state level to present this third option on birth certificates and driver’s licenses,” CBS News continued.

Cannon believes federal recognition is important because of confusion involving what the “X” means when traveling in other states.

“Right now, especially non-binary people, when they go to one state to another, some state trooper may take a look at a license with an ‘X’ on it and go, ‘What is this?’” Cannon said.

First, let’s state the obvious: There’s not a particularly large body of science that proves identifying as non-binary is in any way biological. While there’s an incredibly small number of individuals who are born with intersex traits, that’s definitely not what this is addressing.

Instead, this is mostly about individuals who identify as a sex different from the one they were born — people who claim they’re demigender, third-gender, genderfluid, whatever the case may be. Nobody particularly has to care about this third-gender identification in almost any other aspect of life. When dealing with the government, however, these individuals are either biologically male or female. Putting an X on their driver’s license doesn’t change this very salient fact.

But that isn’t really the point, is it? For the segment of the Democrat field that Sen. Gillibrand finds herself in, the next few months will look increasingly like a leftist political version of “Survivor.”

If all of the aforementioned candidates stay in the race, you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a Biden-Sanders showdown with almost none of these individuals having a shot.

As The Hiill reported Friday, a new poll by the Morning Consult shows that those two men are not only the most popular potential Democratic contenders for 2020 (29 percent of Democrats for Biden, 22 percent for Sanders), but each is backed by the other’s supporters as a second choice. That means they have support that’s both wide and deep.

So, for one of the non-Biden-Sanders candidates to be viable, the others need to get voted off the island. If you want immunity, you need to get yourself noticed, and the best way to do that is conspicuously getting behind something the left will love. Massive taxes! Lettuce! Hippie lettuce! A third gender!

If your pet issue doesn’t catch on, well, the tribe has spoken.

All of this nonsense will either be inconsequential to or deleterious for most of us, mind you. In Gillibrand’s case, I don’t think that individuals who choose to identify as something other than a man or a woman are going to be profoundly validated by seeing an “X” on their driver’s license. In the meantime, we’ll have committed our government to supporting an unscientific-yet-trendy gender movement.

Perhaps most telling is the fact that this idea would have been considered insanely radical just five years ago.

Now we have Gillibrand — arguably the most vanilla of the candidates jockeying to be the not-Biden-not-Sanders torch-bearer — supporting this without a second thought.  In fact, if any Democratic candidates disagreed with this, you can imagine the political firestorm they’d find themselves in. Such is the state of the Democrats in 2019, a party which is more concerned with third genders than the security of the United States.

With all of this posturing, I can’t wait to see what the next few weeks bring.

Kamala Harris livestreaming herself smoking some “joy?” Cory Booker announcing his support for massive kale subsidies, calling it the Very Green New Deal? Beto O’Rourke entering the race and declaring, in a Vermin Supreme-esque move, that he’s going to give everyone a free skateboard? The imagination reels at the possibilities.

Presidential races are unpredictable, of course, and I can’t tell you who the winner will be, but  among the losers will be a) common sense and b) America.

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