Maybe Hollywood will make a movie of the Trump administration called “Eight Days in May.” That’s the period in May 2017 between when President Trump fired the director of the FBI, James Comey, and Robert Mueller was named special prosecutor. Those days were, a new report says, when the Justice Department huddled on whether the new President could be removed under the 25th amendment.

The report is from the CBS’s interview with Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI who ended up getting fired for lying. “The most illuminating and surprising thing in the interview to me,” Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” says, “were these eight days in May when all of these things were happening behind the scenes that the American people really didn’t know about.”

Like, say, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein offering to wear a wire in meetings with the newly elected President. “There were,” Mr. Pelley says, “meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment.”

It strikes us that the outrageousness of this hasn’t fully registered in our debate. Feature, after all, what the 25th Amendment actually says. It is that the vice president may immediately assume the powers of Acting President when the vice president and a majority of the cabinet send to Congress “their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

This is an amendment passed after the shooting of President Kennedy, when for a few horrifying moments America faced the prospects of a president so badly wounded that he might be unable to function. It wasn’t because a cabal of unhappy mid-level Justice Department aides thought the president made a mistake in firing the head of the FBI. Or that they feared JFK had colluded with Russia.

If any aide had policy disputes, he or she could have aired them within the administration. If they feared the president had committed either a high crime or a misdemeanor, they could have taken it to the House. If it wanted, it could impeach a president within an hour. Still could. If the Senate convicts, the president could be ousted the same day. The 25th Amendment has nothing to do with it.

And, of course, the cabinet didn’t come within a kiloparsec of removing Mr. Trump, who is manifestly able to discharge the powers of his office. One could chalk this up as a case of the mice playing when the cat’s away, were it not so contemptuous of a recent presidential election in which 30 states gave the president a mandate. Instead, it undermines the illegitimacy of the whole anti-Trump probe.

It also underlines the importance of the Senate’s confirmation today of William Barr’s return as attorney general. We were concerned going into his confirmation hearings about him being loath to fire the special prosecutor. In the event, General Barr maneuvered that slalom pretty well, we thought, and showed himself to be the kind of mature, savvy, principled lawyer the country needs at the top of the Justice Department.