President Donald Trump didn’t wait long to attack his former White House Chief of Staff after General John Kelly told an audience that LTC Alexander Vindman was right to notify his superiors of Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme.
“When I terminated John Kelly, which I couldn’t do fast enough, he knew full well that he was way over his head,” Trump claimed. Various reports said for months Kelly was on the verge of resigning, and when Trump announced Kelly would exit, he did not say he fired him.
“Being Chief of Staff just wasn’t for him. He came in with a bang, went out with a whimper, but like so many X’s, he misses the action & just can’t keep his mouth shut, which he actually has a military and legal obligation to do,” Trump blasted. That’s false. It’s also another of many examples of Trump hiring or promoting someone then taking zero responsibility when he decides he doesn’t like the job they’re doing. Trump called Kelly “a great American” when moving him from Secretary of Homeland Security to the White House.
“His incredible wife, Karen, who I have a lot of respect for, once pulled me aside & said strongly that ‘John respects you greatly. When we are no longer here, he will only speak well of you.’ Wrong!” Trump concluded Thursday morning.
Trump was referring to an article Thursday morning in The Atlantic, which details remarks Kelly made the night before at Drew University.
“Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said that Vindman is blameless and was simply following the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants are ‘overwhelmingly good people’ and ‘not all rapists’; and Trump’s decision to condition military aid to Ukraine on an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden upended long-standing U.S. policy,” The Atlantic reported.
When Vindman heard the president tell Zelensky he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, that was tantamount to hearing “an illegal order,” Kelly said. “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”
Calling it “exactly the wrong thing to do,” Kelly also “faulted Trump for intervening in the case of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted last year of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter. Trump reversed a Navy decision to oust Gallagher, in a chain of events that led to the resignation of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.”