Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State and Director of the CIA under the Trump administration, has a problem with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley’s testimony before Congressional lawmakers this week, arguing that Milley’s statements were not accurate.
During an interview on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM, he responded to Milley’s statement that he briefed Pompeo and Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and the then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller about his call to his Chinese military counterpart.
Here’s what Pompeo had to say about that:
POMPEO: You know, I think the disconnect here, Megyn, is the subject. What was actually said. I haven’t seen General Milley knock down what Woodward and Costa wrote. Having said that, I know Woodward and Costa well enough to know that you should take everything they write with an enormous grain of salt. The fact that General Milley chose to speak with them at such great length, I find deeply troubling. But in any event, someone needs to explain what’s the disconnect. I heard what General Milley said, he actually talked about on the call with his Chinese counterparts. And I’ve read what has been reportedly going to be in this book. Those aren’t remotely the same, and I think that’s what it gets to.
I have no recollection of General Milley briefing me in the way that he described. But if he said, “Hey, I spoke with my Chinese counterparts yesterday,” that wouldn’t have been something particularly memorable. It would have been relatively ordinary course. I spoke with my Chinese counterparts from time to time as well. Every senior leader in America would do that, but it’s the substance, Megyn. This is what you got to, and what I saw some of the questions about yesterday. If he in fact said, “We will not attack you until we warn you,” that’s just nutty, right? That’s just –
KELLY: You would remember that.
POMPEO: It’s certain that he did not tell Chief Meadows or I that because – I don’t know if he told us, he thinks he told us, on the same phone call, but I can promise you that Chief Meadows would have called me immediately and said, “Hey, we got a real problem here.” And if I had of heard it, I would’ve gone high and right. I’d be very surprised if that’s precisely how General Milley told the Chinese that. I worked with General Milley enough. But if he told Woodward and Costa that he said that, this is something he has to account for, that would be deeply inconsistent with his responsibility as the senior military defense advisor to the President of United States. And it would make no tactical, operational, or strategic sense to tell the Chinese that because, in the end, it wasn’t going to be how we rolled it. It wasn’t how the Trump administration rolled. We didn’t warn our adversaries. We didn’t tell them that there would be a date certain we’d leave Afghanistan. We were very clear. We were going to use American power to protect America’s interests. And we weren’t about warning our adversaries of a potential attack if it was inconsistent with our objectives.
When you take into consideration other things that Milley did under the Trump administration, his explanation of his phone call to his Chinese military counterpart appears to be a load of bullschtein.
There was a report that when Milley got wind of former President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban for a US withdrawal, he was so angry he contacted his friends at the Pentagon and got them to order over 30 drone strikes and 8 Special Operations night raids on Taliban positions in hopes it would kill the deal.
After the 2020 election, while Trump was trying to prove the election was stolen from him, two retired military officers wrote an open letter to Milley stating if Trump refused to leave as of January 20, Milley should put together a group of soldiers who would go into the White House and drag him out. And he did.
… the general’s worries grew rapidly as the president plunged the nation into chaos following Election Day. Seven days later, Milley got a call from “an old friend” with an explicit warning that Trump and his allies were trying to “overturn the government.” Milley was confident that any attempts by Trump to hold on to power would be thwarted, because the military wouldn’t go along. “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed,” he told aides. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”
Milley reportedly referred to Trump supporters as Nazis while he served as Trump’s Joint Chiefs Chairman. This is a man who thinks he’s bigger than the president of the United States. Anything Mark Milley says must be taken with a dump truck of salt, because the man is pathological.
The thing to remember is that as the Joint Chiefs Chairman, Milley has no command structure. His sole job is to advise the President. He had no authority to make that phone call to tell our enemy that he has control over the sitting president and that we were not going to attack them. Forget the fact that all of that was built up in Milley’s head. Trump never talked about attacking China. At one point in his testimony he said to make decisions like going around his Commander-in-Chief like that was a part of his job, but later in his testimony he said making decisions was not a part of his job when asked why he went along with Biden’s plan to withdraw the military before getting the Americans and our Afghan allies out first.
Which is it, General?
