Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certification

[admin]

Trump's defense secretary denies there were orders to have 10K troops ready to deploy on January 6
by Annie Grayer
CNN
Updated 10:22 PM ET, Tue July 26, 2022

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(CNN) Former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller told the House select committee investigating the Capitol Hill insurrection that former President Donald Trump never gave him a formal order to have 10,000 troops ready to be deployed to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, according to new video of Miller's deposition released by the committee.

"I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature," Miller said in the video.

Miller later said in the video definitively, "There was no direct, there was no order from the President."

"We obviously had plans for activating more folks, but that was not anything more than contingency planning," Miller added. "There was no official message traffic or anything of that nature."

Trump has previously said that he requested National Guard troops be ready for January 6. He released a statement on June 9 that he "suggested & offered" up to 20,000 National Guard troops be deployed to Washington, DC, ahead of January 6 claiming it was because he felt "that the crowd was going to be very large."

The committee released Miller's testimony after already revealing that Trump did not make calls to military personnel or law enforcement to intervene as the Capitol attack was unfolding. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee that he never received a call from Trump as the attack as unfolding.

Milley testified to the committee that he spoke to former Vice President Mike Pence "two or three" times on January 6. Keith Kellogg, former national security adviser to Pence, also told the committee that Trump never asked for a law enforcement response.

***********************

Trump never told Defense secretary to ready 10,000 troops for January 6, new committee video shows - after witnesses say acting Pentagon chief wasn't given any orders that day
by Nikki Schwab, Senior U.S. Political Reporter
Daily Mail
PUBLISHED: 20:23 EDT, 26 July 2022 | UPDATED: 22:56 EDT, 26 July 2022

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* Former President Donald Trump never ordered his acting Defense secretary to have 10,000 National Guard troops at the ready in preparation for January 6

* The House committee on January 6 put out a video Tuesday evening focused on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller's testimony

*'Trump also failed to give any order prior to January 6 to deploy the military to protect the Capitol,' the committee said in a tweet

* 'I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature,' Miller said of a claim 10,000 troops were made ready by Mark Meadows

* In recent posts on Truth Social, Trump has continued to make the claim he called up 10,000 troops in preparation for January 6

Former President Donald Trump never ordered his acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller to have 10,000 National Guard troops at the ready in preparation for January 6 - the date Congress was tallying the results of the 2020 election.

The House committee on January 6 put out a video Tuesday evening focused on Miller's testimony.

'To remove any doubt: Not only did Donald Trump fail to contact his Secretary of Defense on January 6th (as shown in our hearing), Trump also failed to give any order prior to January 6 to deploy the military to protect the Capitol,' the committee's tweet sharing the video said.


https://twitter.com/January6thCmte/stat ... -deploy%2F
Former President Donald Trump never ordered his acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller (pictured) to have 10,000 National Guard troops at the ready in preparation for January 6, Miller's testimony to the January 6 committee confirmed


Former President Donald Trump, photographed giving a speech in Washington, D.C. Tuesday, was shown during Thursday's January 6 committee hearing to not have acted for hours amid the January 6 Capitol attack

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump - 1h
Why didn't they use the 10,000 troops that I offered up on January 3rd? There would have been no January 6th?

Former President Donald Trump, along with his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, claimed that Trump ordered 10,000 to be ready on January 6, when Congress was tallying the results of the 2020 election

In testimony to the House committee, Miller - who was only Defense secretary from November 9, 2020 to January 20, 2021 - was asked about a claim former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows saying in an interview that 'as many as 10,000 National Guard troops were told to be on the ready by the secretary of Defense.'

'Not from my perspective,' Miller said. 'I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature. So I was surprised by seeing that publicly. But I don't know the context or even where it was.'

Meadows made the comments in February 2021 on Fox News, but Trump has continued to tout that tally.

In a post from Truth Social in June, Trump wrote: 'Why didn't they use the 10,000 troops that I offered up on January 3rd? There would have been no January 6th?'

Miller indicated there were National Guard troops at the president's disposal to respond to January 6 but there was 'not anything more than contingency planning.'

'A non-military person probably could have some sort of weird interpretation,' he added, giving Meadows the benefit of the doubt.

'But no, the answer to your question is no,' he responded when asked if 10,000 troops had been ordered.

He also confirmed there had been no direct push from Trump.

'That's correct there was no direct - there was no order from the president,' Miller said.

The video was posted five days after the committee's primetime hearing that had been dedicated to Trump's refusal to act amid the Capitol attack.

Witnesses told the committee that Trump spent hours on January 6 in the White House dining room watching TV, while aides, family members, lawmakers and allies pleaded with him to tell his supporters to go home.

**********************

New video: Trump defense secretary calls BS on his Jan. 6 lie that he had 10K troops ready to deploy: There was “no order from the president," Chris Miller said in new video released by Jan. 6 committee
by Igor Derysh
Deputy Politics Editor
Salon
PUBLISHED JULY 27, 2022 9:15AM (EDT)

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Thousands of Donald Trump supporters gather outside the U.S. Capitol building following a "Stop the Steal" rally on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller testified to the House Jan. 6 committee that former President Donald Trump never ordered 10,000 troops to be ready to deploy to the Capitol on Jan. 6 despite his repeated claims.

Trump and former chief of staff Mark Meadows previously claimed that the administration had 10,000 National Guard troops ready to deploy to the Capitol.

Miller told the committee that there was no "accuracy" to those statements in a new deposition video released by the panel on Tuesday.

"I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature," Miller told the committee, adding that he was "surprised by seeing that publicly" because there was "no order from the president."

Miller explained that "obviously we had plans for activating more folks but that was not anything more than contingency planning."

"There was no official message traffic or anything of that nature," he added.

Pressed again on whether the Defense Department had 10,000 troops ready for Jan. 6, Miller said that a "nonmilitary person could have some sort of weird interpretation but no, the answer to your questions is no."

"That was not part of my plan or the Department of Defense's plan," he said.

January 6th Committee
@January6thCmte - Follow
To remove any doubt: Not only did Donald Trump fail to contact his Secretary of Defense on January 6th (as shown in our hearing), Trump also failed to give any order prior to January 6 to deploy the military to protect the Capitol.

Here is Secretary Miller’s testimony—

[x]
https://twitter.com/January6thCmte/stat ... -deploy%2F

Audio of Select Committee Interview Former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller

[Committee] So I want to be clear that -- since then, in February 2021, Mark Meadows said on Fox News that, "Even in January, that was a given as many as 10,000 National Guard Troops were told to be on the ready by the Secretary of Defense." Is there any accuracy to that statement?

[Chris Miller] I'm not -- not from my perspective. I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature. So I was surprised by seeing that publicly. But I don't know the context or you know where it was. So there was -- obviously we had plans for activating more folks, but that was not anything more than contingency planning. There was no official message traffic or anything of that nature regarding --

[Committee] So just so we're clear: You did not have 10,000 troops "to be on the ready for January 6th" prior to January 6th?

[Chris Miller] A nonmilitary person probably could have some sort of weird interpretation, but no. The answer to your question is no. That was not part of my plan or the Department of Defense's plan.

[Committee] And just the rest of his statement was, "That was a direct order from President Trump. And yet here is what we see, all kinds of blame going around, but not a whole lot of accountability." To be crystal clear, there was no direct order from President Trump to put 10,000 troops to be on the ready for January 6th, correct?

[Chris Miller] No. Yeah. That's correct. There was no direct -- there was no order from the President.

3:21 PM · Jul 26, 2022

Not only did Trump not order the National Guard to be ready, but he also urged Miller to "do whatever is necessary to protect the demonstrators that were executing their constitutionally protected rights," Miller testified in May.

Meadows in an email released by the committee even suggested that the National Guard would "protect pro-Trump people."

The 10,000-troop claim has been repeatedly cited by Trump and his allies to cast blame for the deadly Capitol riot on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

"Don't forget, President Trump requested increased National Guard support in the days leading up to January 6. The request was rejected — by Pelosi, by congressional leaders, including requests, by the way, from the Capitol Police chief," Fox News host Sean Hannity said while interviewing Meadows in December.

Meadows has repeatedly made the claim about the troops.

"What we also know is that President Trump wanted to make sure that the people that came, that there was a safe environment for that kind of assembly. And I've said that publicly before — the 10,000 National Guard troops that he wanted to make sure that everything was safe and secure," Meadows told Hannity at the time. "Obviously having those National Guards available, actually the reason they were able to respond when they did, was because President Trump had actually put them on alert."

Trump made the claim as early as February 28, 2021, just weeks after the riot.

"I requested … I definitely gave the number of 10,000 National Guardsmen, and [said] I think you should have 10,000 of the National Guard ready," he claimed in a Fox News interview. "They took that number. From what I understand, they gave it to the people at the Capitol, which is controlled by Pelosi. And I heard they rejected it because they didn't think it would look good. So, you know, that was a big mistake."

Trump earlier this month updated his claim, falsely writing on Truth Social that he requested up to "20,000 troops to stand guard at the Capitol."

The committee has shown copious evidence that Trump never acted or made any calls to law enforcement or military officials on Jan. 6, watching the violence play out on Fox News in his dining room instead.

Trump in a video recorded on Jan. 7, 2021, falsely claimed that he "immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement" to secure the Capitol.

The Jan. 6 committee previously released video last month of Trump of Joints Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley revealing that it was then-Vice President Mike Pence who demanded National Guard support.

"Vice President Pence – there were two or three calls with Vice President Pence," Milley testified. "He was very animated, and he issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders. There was no question about that. And I can get you the exact quotes, I guess, from some of our records somewhere. But he was very animated, very direct, very firm to Secretary Miller: Get the military down here, get the Guard down here, put down this situation, et cetera."

He added that he later received a call from Meadows urging him to "kill the narrative" that Pence was calling the shots.

"He said – this is from memory, he said: 'We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative, you know, that the president is still in charge and that things are steady or stable,' or words to that effect," Milley told the committee. "I immediately interpreted that as politics, politics, politics. Red flag for me, personally, no action. But I remember it distinctly. And I don't do political narratives."

Pence's national security adviser Gen. Keith Kellogg and Trump aide Nick Luna also testified that they were unaware of any requests Trump made to the National Guard or any law enforcement agency.

Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said at a hearing last month that Trump not only refused to call off his mob but "placed no call to any element of the United States government to instruct that the Capitol be defended."

"He did not call his secretary of defense on Jan. 6. He did not talk to his Attorney General. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security," Cheney added. "President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day. And he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets."

January 6th Committee
@January6thCmte · Follow
"Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day, and made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets. But Mike Pence did." - @RepLizCheney

Testimony from General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

[x]
https://twitter.com/January6thCmte/stat ... -deploy%2F

[Liz Cheney] Not only did President Trump refuse to tell the mob to leave the Capitol, he placed no call to any element of the United States government to instruct that the Capitol be defended. He did not call his Secretary of Defense on January 6th. He did not talk to his Attorney General. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day, and he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets. But Vice President Pence did each of those things. For example, Here is what General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified to this committee:

[General Milley] There were two or three calls with Vice President Pence. He was very animated. And he issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders. There was no question about that. And he was, and I can get you the exact quotes, I guess from some of our records somewhere. But he was very animated, very direct, very firm, and to Secretary Miller, "get the military down, and get the Guard down here. Put down this situation," etc.

[Liz Cheney] By contrast, here is General Milley's description of his conversation with President Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows on January 6th:

He said, "we have, we have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that, you know, that the President is still in charge and that things are steady or stable, or words to that effect." I immediately interpreted that as, "politics, politics, politics." Red flag for me personally, no action. But I remember it distinctly.

8:56 PM Jun 9, 2022

[admin]

An Absolute Lie
by Chris Hayes
MSNBC
Jul 28, 2022



0:00
so one of the questions that has
0:01
lingered in the year and a half since
0:03
the violent attack on january 6 is why
0:05
the capitol police were basically left
0:06
alone to defend themselves and all the
0:08
lawmakers inside the building, not to
0:10
mention the seat of the u.s government.
0:12
how could it be that there was no plan
0:14
to support them ahead of a day that
0:15
donald trump teased would be "wild"?
0:18
and why did it take so long for backup
0:20
to arrive on the 6th when it was clear
0:22
the capitol piece were overwhelmed. we
0:23
saw it on television. where was the
0:25
national guard?
0:27
well, beginning that very afternoon, the
0:29
trump white house attempted to tamp down
0:31
those concerns with a big lie.
0:34
hours into the attack, press secretary
0:36
kayleigh mcenaney tweeted, at president
0:38
trump's direction, "the national guard is
0:40
on the way."
0:41
not true!
0:42
just a lie. not true. donald trump never
0:45
directed the national guard to go to the
0:46
capitol. maybe she was mistaken. but in
0:49
the days before or on january 6, it didn't
0:51
happen. that did not stop trump himself
0:54
from then lying on january 7th.
0:58
[Donald Trump] "i immediately deployed the national
1:00
guard
1:01
and federal law enforcement to secure
1:03
the building and expel the intruders.
1:07
america is, and must always be, a nation
1:10
of law and order."
1:12
[Chris Hayes] we now know, thanks to testimony to the
1:14
january 6 committee, donald trump's staff
1:15
had to convince him to make that speech,
1:17
the january 7th one, in the first place.
1:19
and when he finally agreed, practically
1:21
the first thing out of his mouth, was
1:23
that lie: " i deployed the national guard." it
1:26
had already been debunked, the new york
1:27
times reporting on the evening of
1:29
january 6th that trump, "rebuffed and
1:32
resisted requests to mobilize the
1:33
national guard, and in the end it was
1:35
vice president mike pence who approved
1:37
the order to deploy."
1:39
that did not stop trump and his allies
1:41
and his staff from repeating the lie over
1:44
and over again.
1:46
[Mark Meadows, Fox News] "even in january that was was given. as
1:49
many as ten thousand national guard
1:51
troops were told to be on the ready by
1:54
the secretary of defense. that was a
1:56
direct order from president trump."
1:59
[Chris Hayes] a few weeks after that, trump said it
2:01
again, in an interview on fox news, this
2:02
time trying to dump some of the blame on
2:04
nancy pelosi.
2:06
[Donald Trump, Fox News] "i definitely gave the number of ten
2:08
thousand,
2:09
uh, national guardsmen. i think you should
2:12
have ten thousand of the national guard
2:15
ready. uh, they took that number, from what
2:17
i understand, they gave it to the people
2:19
at the capitol, which is controlled by
2:21
pelosi.
2:22
and i heard they rejected it, because
2:24
they didn't think it would look good."
2:27
[Chris Hayes] of course, the new part also completely
2:28
untrue. just
2:30
fabricated whole cloth. trump has
2:32
continued to spread this lie. even
2:33
recently on his fake twitter platform,
2:35
falsely claiming he recommended, offered
2:37
thousands of troops, and pelosi refused
2:39
them. he will not stop repeating this.
2:41
even now, 18 months later. then, of course,
2:43
there's the cable news echo chamber for
2:45
trump's pseudo alibi.
2:48
[Sean Hannity] "donald trump authorized up to 20,000
2:50
national guard soldiers to protect the
2:53
capitol."
[Sean Hannity] "donald trump authorized the use
2:56
of 20,000 national guard troops."
[Sean Hannity] "donald
2:58
trump called up the national guard two
3:00
days prior."
[Sean Hannity] "don't forget president trump
3:03
requested increased national guard
3:04
support in the days leading up to the to
3:07
january 6."
3:09
[Chris Hayes] sean hannity was still doing this as
3:11
recently as last month. according to
3:12
media matters, he pushed the lie hundreds
3:14
of times in total on at least 43 episodes
3:17
of his show, including when he asked
3:19
donald trump's acting secretary of
3:20
defense at the time, chris miller, and chris
3:22
miller's chief of staff kash patel to
3:24
confirm they heard trump authorize the
3:26
use of national guard troops before the
3:28
6th.
3:30
[Kash Patel] "Mr. Trump unequivocally authorized up to 20,000 national guardsmen and women for us to utilize should the second part of the law, the request come in. But those requests never did, as you highlighted."
[Sean Hannity] "Let me be very clear: both of you said this under oath, under the threat of a penalty of perjury, to the committee?
[Chris Miller] Absolutely, Sean.
[Chris Hayes] Chris Miller, "Absolutely Sean." Now there's no law against lying to Fox News viewers, and if there was they would not have a network. But there is a law against lying under oath. So what story do you think Chris Miller, the guy who told Sean Hannity last month that Trump ordered the guard to be deployed, before the 6th to be ready, what he told the January 6 committee? Well, the Committee has released the tape. We'll play it for you next.
[Kash Patel] "Mr. Trump unequivocally authorized up to 20,000 national guardsmen and women for us to utilize should the second part of the law, the requests come in. But those requests never did as you highlighted."
[Sean Hannity] "Let me me be very clear: both of you said this under oath, under the threat of a penalty of perjury, to the Committee?
[Chris Miller] Absolutely, Sean.
[Chris Hayes] "Under threat of oath, perjury. Absolutely, Sean. Unequivocally." Not a lot of wiggle room in those statements.
Since January 6, Donald Trump and his allies, like Kash Patel -- who apparently wears a custom Kash Patel lapel pin, with a dollar sign on it -- have repeated this utter lie over and over, that the ex-president authorized the national guard to defend the capitol from the mob in the days, uh, leading to it, and then he ordered them to go in. Well now, the January 6 Committee has released definitive proof debunking it. This is testimony under oath from one of the very men you just heard spreading the lie, with Sean Hannity on Fox News last month, Donald Trump's acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller.
[Committee] "I want to be clear here that since then, in February of 2021, Mark Meadows said on Fox News that "even in January, that was a given, as many as 10,000 National Guard troops were told to be on the ready by the Secretary of Defense." Is there any accuracy to that statement?
[Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller] "Not, not from my perspective. I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature, so I was surprised by seeing that publicly. But I don't know the context, or you know, where it was. But no, there was no -- we obviously had plans for activating more folks, uh, but that was not anything more than contingency planning. There was no official message traffic, or anything of that nature."
[Committee] "Just so we're clear, you did not have 10,000 troops 'to be on the ready for January 6th, prior to January 6th?'"
[Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller] "Uh, a non-military person probably could have some sort of weird interpretation, but no, to answer your question. That was not, uh, part of my plan, or the Department of Defense's plan."
Chris Hayes] Lies, just lies. They just lie.
Joining us, now Elie Mystal, justice
correspondent for the nation where he
covers politics, and the courts, and also
lies. Um Elie, I,
this is just one small
little nugget. Right? It's just like one
thing.
But it's just very rare that you sort of get them to say the
truth.
And what to me this sort of speaks to, in
some ways, is the power of
subpoenas, the power of being under oath,
which is a real thing, with real
consequences.
And it really does matter. So here we have
an example of why it matters. Why it
matters that a January 6 Committee can get
people under oath. Because they can't lie
like they do on Sean Hannity when
they're before the Committee.
[Elie Mystal] Yeah, Chris Miller might as well have
said, um, "It is weird that people actually
believed the words coming out of my mouth,
because who would do that?" Clear? Like,
that was his testimony under oath. And
you're exactly right Chris: this is why
the subpoenas have so much power. But
this is a lesson that we all need to
learn. And I would argue, we should have
learned in, I don't know, circa 2015.
These people lie
for a living. All they know how to do is
lie. If they are not under oath,
everything they say should be viewed as
a lie. If Donald Trump says, "I had a
cheeseburger for dinner," what should
happen next is a voiceover saying, "MSNBC
News cannot confirm whether or not Trump
got the cheeseburger, or the chicken
nuggets in his happy meal."
I mean,
we have to
independently verify everything they say,
because all they do is lie. That's all
they know how to do. Remember Chris, just
a couple weeks ago, Cassidy Hutchinson
testified,
and then there was all this right-wing
drama, "Oh, the Secret Service is gonna --
Tony Ornato is gonna testify." No. Did they do
that? No. Because they were lying. Nope. And
they weren't gonna come under oath to
lie, so they just had to put this out
there, when everybody knew that Cassidy
Hutchinson was telling the truth, because
she testified under oath. And these
unnamed sources were just lying. At some
point, the rest of the media needs to
catch up to reality and stop
platforming these liars uncritically.
[Liz Cheney] "that is when you heard the president say
9:06
the people with weapons weren't there to
9:07
hurt him, and that he wanted the secret
9:09
service to remove the magnetometers"?
9:12
[Cassidy Hutchinson] "that's correct."
[Liz cheney] "when the president said
9:14
that he would be going to the capitol
9:15
during his speech on the ellipse, the
9:17
secret service scrambled to find a way
9:20
for him to go."
[Cassidy Hutchinson] "mr meadows had a
9:22
conversation with me where he wanted me
9:25
to work with secret service on a
9:27
movement from the white house to the
9:28
Willard hotel so he could attend the
9:30
meeting,
9:31
or meetings, with mr giuliani and his
9:33
associates."
9:36
[Chris Hayes] one thing the january 6 hearings showed
9:37
us was just how integral the secret
9:39
service was to what happened the day of
9:41
the capitol attack. which is why it was
9:44
such a huge shock when we learned that all of
9:45
the text messages, from dozens of agents
9:47
on january 5th and 6th, were deleted.
9:50
that prompted the department of homeland
9:52
security inspector general to open an
9:54
investigation into the agency.
9:56
it's important to note the inspector
9:57
general himself was the same dhs
9:59
inspector general during the trump
10:01
administration. in fact, the guy who heads
10:03
up the secret service right now is the
10:05
same guy who oversaw it during the
10:07
insurrection.
10:08
after the investigation into deleted text
10:10
messages was launched, a spokesperson for
10:12
the secret service released a statement
10:14
saying, "the insinuation that the secret
10:16
service maliciously deleted text
10:18
messages following a request is false."
10:20
instead blaming a technical error. but
10:22
now top democrats are calling for the
10:24
inspector general to step aside, because
10:26
he reportedly found out about those
10:28
deleted text messages, "in december
10:30
20-21, two months earlier than previously
10:33
reported, and did not alert congress at
10:36
the time.
10:37
now jay johnson served as the head of
10:39
the department of homeland security
10:40
under president barack obama. it's the
10:42
body that oversees the secret service.
10:44
and he joins me now. um, it's great to
10:46
have you on. i want to start with the
10:48
secret service, because
10:50
it's a agency with a lot of mythos
10:53
attached to it. they have obviously an
10:54
incredibly important and crucial job. i
10:56
think there's lots of people who work
10:57
there who are, you know, patriots who take
10:59
their job very seriously. institutionally,
11:03
the story the secret service is telling
11:05
here doesn't really add up. and i'm
11:08
wondering your perspective as a person
11:09
who worked at dhs. like how are you
11:11
hearing all this?
11:14
[Jay Johnson] Chris, first of all thanks for having me
11:16
on. my internet connection's a little
11:18
unstable, so you might lose me. and you'll
11:20
end up talking to yourself.
11:21
but,
11:22
uh i was the oversight of the secret
11:25
service
11:26
uh for three years. and i was a protectee
11:28
of the secret service for three years. i
11:30
was in their constant
11:31
company. um,
11:34
a little perspective here. the secret
11:36
service
11:37
is trained
11:39
to take a bullet for the protectee. on
11:41
occasion, even the secret service is
11:44
trained to,
11:45
uh, save a protectee from himself, as we
11:48
saw on
11:49
january 6th.
11:51
I would be, I have to say, I would be very surprised to learn that there was something nefarious around January 6th, related to January 6, through the loss of these text messages. For as long as I've known the Secret Service, going back to my days as a federal prosecutor 33 years ago, they are good at some things, but they are not good at the back office stuff.

Friends, now I'm going to talk about something that probably qualifies as irony. When I was a federal prosecutor at the D.C. U.S. attorney's office, and we seized evidence, computers or cell phones, and we needed to have forensic searches conducted of the computers, or of the cell phones, you know where I went? I didn't go to the Metropolitan Police Department. I didn't even go to the FBI lab down at Quantico, although I used their services regularly for other forensic endeavors. No, I went to the U.S. Secret Service Forensic Science Division. That was the unit that we most often used to conduct forensic searches of cell phones. And they were really good at what they did. They were especially good at retrieving things that had been deleted from cell phones, or deleted from computers. I'm betting they probably still are good at what they do. And in fact, if you look at the U.S. Secret Service website, you'll see that they think they're pretty good at what they do. There's the website for the Secret Service, touting their forensic expertise: "expertise in processing and analyzing digital multimedia, items of evidence, expertise in cyber forensics, which includes a cyber workforce of special agents and forensic analysts dedicated to conducting advanced computer, mobile device" -- that would be cell phones -- "and vehicle infotainment systems forensic examinations using specialized methods, software, and equipment and their cyber forensic teams work to identify and secure criminal evidence for prosecution." I guess, except, when they're deleting their own text messages that are of enormous investigative value.

-- Secret Service deletes Jan. 6 text messages. A move to protect Trump? Also, Mike Pence MUST testify, by Glenn Kirschner, Justice Matters

And uh, one of the things that frustrated me most in the job as DHS secretary of oversight were the number of unforced errors coming out of that agency, while on the other hand their central mission is executed flawlessly, like a U.N. general assembly, for example, the largest domestic security operation of 2015, led by the Secret Service. Um, so, in the context of the events around January 6, where you have
in the presidential transition, an outgoing President who frankly is unhinged, an incoming President, the Secret Service is in the middle of that transition, they're managing the security on January 20, and the nation is on high alert. Uh, frankly, I'm not surprised that they did not get the data migration completely perfect. Uh, we will learn more about this, but, um, I've had to admonish the Secret Service, I've had to ask for a Director's resignation. It is far from perfect in its execution of a number of things, without a doubt.

Chris Hayes: that's a that's a very interesting
13:25
perspective and and illuminating because
13:27
of the experience that you had there
13:28
were some uh you know there were some
13:30
scandals there the secret service during
13:32
during your the period of time that that
13:33
you were overseeing it um i want to ask
13:36
too about something that you said you
13:37
were former federal prosecutors you just
13:38
referenced um and you said that
13:42
more or less that the case the public
13:44
evidence thus presented
13:47
could in the hands of it i think you
13:48
said aggressive prosecutor
13:50
be an indictable prosecutable case
13:53
elaborate on that
13:55
based upon everything we know from
13:57
public sources
13:58
including most notably the january 6th
14:01
hearings
14:02
i believe
14:03
that an aggressive prosecutor
14:06
would be willing to take on the case
14:08
against donald trump
14:09
for
14:10
participation in a seditious conspiracy
14:13
for violation of the insurrection
14:15
statute
14:16
in my opinion january 6 was a very
14:18
definition of an insurrection and the
14:21
statute punishes those who incite the
14:24
insurrection and those who give aid and
14:26
comfort thereto
14:28
donald trump lit the match uh that
14:30
started the conflagration there were
14:32
moments during january 6 where he flew
14:34
he uh
14:35
poured gasoline on the fire and he was
14:38
the commander-in-chief of all the
14:40
firemen
14:41
and
14:42
and failed to call them in
14:44
uh i i believe that uh
14:47
we're well within the range of potential
14:50
criminal liability uh if a an aggressive
14:53
prosecutor is willing to take that on
14:57
i you know you served in the obama
14:58
administration uh you were the if i'm
15:00
not mistaken the general counsel
15:02
department of defense um you've long
15:04
distinguished legal career i tend to
15:06
think of the the individuals like
15:08
yourself who made up the obama cabinet
15:10
and worked close to the former president
15:12
as you know pretty strong
15:13
institutionalists i mean really believe
15:15
in american institutions believe that
15:17
they are uh that they can be uh made to
15:20
be responsive and and and produce uh
15:22
increases in in our welfare
15:25
and i guess i wonder is what do you
15:27
think about the case of like that you
15:28
know this will be bad for the country
15:30
it'll tear the country apart it's
15:31
institutionally reckless to prosecute an
15:34
ex-president from from your perspective
15:35
to someone who's served as long as you
15:37
have
15:39
uh chris i respect and admire what
15:42
gerald ford did in 1974
15:45
75
15:47
sparing the country the prosecution of
15:48
richard nixon
15:50
i think we live in different times right
15:52
now
15:53
an argument could be made
15:55
that
15:56
um
15:57
if there is an indictable case against
16:00
the former president yet we fail to
16:02
prosecute him we may be doing more harm
16:05
to our democracy
16:06
uh than if we forebear
16:09
and it's a different time now and
16:11
in my judgment the actions that occurred
16:14
during the trump presidency around
16:16
january 6 and before were actually far
16:18
more serious than watergate
16:21
yeah jay johnson uh thank you so much
16:23
for for hanging out uh through those
16:25
hanging with us through those technical
16:26
adults i really appreciate it thank you
16:28
always great to see you thank you very
16:29
much
16:32
[Music]
17:10
you

**********************

Miller Contradicts Himself, Says Trump Did Not Order to Deploy Jan.6 Troops
by Gerrard Kaonga
Newsweek
7/27/22 AT 4:44 AM EDT

The January 6 committee has released the audio testimony of former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller in which he said ex-President Donald Trump did not give any order prior to the January 6 Capitol riot to deploy the military.

The video has also gone viral on Twitter and has more than one million views since it was posted on Tuesday.

The audio testimony from Miller contradicts not only what Trump has previously said about his actions to prevent violence on January 6, 2021, but also what Miller has said about Trump's actions.

January 6th Committee
@January6thCmte · Follow
To remove any doubt: Not only did Donald Trump fail to contact his Secretary of Defense on January 6th (as shown in our hearing), Trump also failed to give any order prior to January 6 to deploy the military to protect the Capitol.

Here is Secretary Miller’s testimony—

https://twitter.com/i/status/1552041350941532168

3:21 PM · Jul 26, 2022

Miller was asked by a committee interviewer about comments made by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Fox News in February 2021.

The interviewer quoted Meadows saying that as many as 10,000 National Guard troops were told to be on the ready by the secretary of defense.

When asked if there was any accuracy to the statement, Miller said: "I'm not... not from my perspective.

"I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature.

"So I was surprised by seeing that publicly but I don't know the context or even where it was.

"So, no there was... obviously we had plans for activating more folks, but that was not anything more than contingency planning.

"There was no official message traffic or anything."

He was cut off and the interviewer asked for clarification about whether there were or were not 10,000 troops on the ready for January 6 prior to January 6.

He answered: "A non-military person probably could have some sort of weird interpretation, but no. The answer to your question is no.

"That was not part of my plan or the Department of Defense's plan.

He added: "There was no direct... there was no order from the president."

On June 9, 2022, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to say that he offered up to 20,000 National Guard or troops to be deployed.

"The Unselect Committee has now learned that I, as President suggested and offered up to 20,000 National Guard, or troops, be deployed in D.C. because it was felt that the crowd was going to be very large," he posted.

"Crazy Nancy Pelosi turned down the offer, she didn't like the way it looked. Likewise, the Mayor of D.C.

"Had they taken up the offer, there would have been no January 6. The Unselects have ruled Pelosi 'off limits, no questions.' The hearing is another political HOAX to counter inflation etc."

A clip of Miller on Sean Hannity's show has also gone viral showing him say that he testified under oath that Trump authorized 20,000 troops. It is not clear on what date Miller was on Hannity's show, however.

cyn
@Acyn · Follow
Replying to @Acyn
Here is Miller saying on Hannity he testified under oath that Trump authorized 20k troops

https://twitter.com/i/status/1552053211640451072

4:08 PM · Jul 26, 2022

While on the show, former Defense Department official Kash Patel said: "Mr. Trump unequivocally authorized up to 20,000 National Guardsmen and women for us to utilize.

Hannity asked: "Let me be very clear. Both of you said this under oath, under the threat of perjury, to the committee?

Miller replied: "Absolutely Sean and to be clear, Kash brought it up best. The meeting was one of the most serious kinds of heavy meetings I have been in.

"It was about a foreign threat that was directed towards the United States. Obviously, we can't talk to you about that for fear of ending up in jail.

He continued: "The president, as we are leaving, says one more thing and we all sat back down and we discussed what was going on on January 6.

"I think it is important to bring up so that the opposition doesn't get this idea that this was the purpose of the meeting.

"The president was doing exactly what I expect the Commander in Chief to do, he was looking at the broad threats against the United States and he brought this up on his own, we did not bring it up."

Newsweek has contacted Trump's office and Miller for comment.

[admin]

Secret Service deletes Jan. 6 text messages. A move to protect Trump? Also, Mike Pence MUST testify
by Glenn Kirschner
Justice Matters
7/15/22

Friends, now I'm going to talk about something that probably qualifies as irony. When I was a federal prosecutor at the D.C. U.S. attorney's office, and we seized evidence, computers or cell phones, and we needed to have forensic searches conducted of the computers, or of the cell phones, you know where I went? I didn't go to the Metropolitan Police Department. I didn't even go to the FBI lab down at Quantico, although I used their services regularly for other forensic endeavors. No, I went to the U.S. Secret Service Forensic Science Division. That was the unit that we most often used to conduct forensic searches of cell phones. And they were really good at what they did. They were especially good at retrieving things that had been deleted from cell phones, or deleted from computers. I'm betting they probably still are good at what they do. And in fact, if you look at the U.S. Secret Service website, you'll see that they think they're pretty good at what they do. There's the website for the Secret Service, touting their forensic expertise: "expertise in processing and analyzing digital multimedia, items of evidence, expertise in cyber forensics, which includes a cyber workforce of special agents and forensic analysts dedicated to conducting advanced computer, mobile device" -- that would be cell phones -- "and vehicle infotainment systems forensic examinations using specialized methods, software, and equipment and their cyber forensic teams work to identify and secure criminal evidence for prosecution." I guess, except, when they're deleting their own text messages that are of enormous investigative value.

-- Secret Service deletes Jan. 6 text messages. A move to protect Trump? Also, Mike Pence MUST testify, by Glenn Kirschner, Justice Matters

It seems that no day goes by without a new revelation about some kind of governmental shenanigans, malfeasance, corruption or worse. We now know that the US Secret Service deleted text messages of its officers from January 5 and 6, 2021, AFTER the Office of the I,nspector General requested those texts as part of its investigation of the Secret Service. This video discusses the implications and consequences of this revelation.

Also, it probably qualifies as irony that federal prosecutors in DC routinely use the Secret Service Forensic Sciences Division to perform forensic searches of computers and cell phones, including when prosecutors seek to retrieve informations deleted from computers and cell phones.

This video also explores the need for former Vice President Mike Pence to testify to the January 6 House select committee, particularly now that important text message evidence has ben deleted by the Secret Service.



0:00
so friends have you heard the one about
0:03
the secret service deleting its text
0:07
messages
0:08
from january 5 and january 6. you know
0:12
right around the time of the
0:14
insurrection it's quite a tale
0:18
let's talk about it
0:20
because justice
0:22
matters
0:32
[Music]
0:39
hey all glenn kirschner here
0:41
so friends why should a single day go by
0:45
without us learning about some new
0:48
governmental shenanigans
0:50
malfeasance corruption
0:53
maybe a little outright crime
0:56
we now know
0:57
that text messages of secret service
1:01
officers
1:02
from january 5 and january 6 2021
1:07
text messages that undoubtedly would
1:09
have shed some important light
1:12
on among other things what donald trump
1:15
was up to
1:16
at the time of the insurrection
1:19
those text messages have been deleted
1:23
by the secret service
1:26
here's the new reporting from cnn
1:30
secret service erased text messages from
1:33
january 5 and 6 2021
1:36
after oversight officials asked for them
1:41
and that article begins
1:43
the u.s secret service erase text
1:46
messages from january 5 and 6 shortly
1:49
after they were requested by oversight
1:52
officials investigating the agency's
1:54
response to the u.s capitol riot
1:58
according to a letter given to the house
2:00
select committee investigating the
2:02
insurrection
2:04
and here is part of a letter that was
2:08
written by the inspector general the
2:10
person who was seeking this evidence
2:13
a gentleman named joseph kefari here's
2:16
part of a letter he wrote to
2:18
representative benny thompson and other
2:21
members of congress
2:23
the office of the inspector general
2:25
notified benny thompson and others that
2:28
quote
2:29
many u.s secret service text messages
2:32
from january 5 and 6 2021
2:35
were erased as part of a device
2:39
replacement program
2:41
the us secret service erased those text
2:44
messages
2:45
after
2:47
italicized
2:48
after oig the office of the inspector
2:52
general requested records of electronic
2:54
communications from the u.s secret
2:57
service as part of our evaluation of
3:00
events
3:01
at the capitol on january 6th
3:06
Friends, now I'm going to talk about
something that
probably qualifies as irony.
When I was a federal prosecutor at the
D.C. U.S. attorney's office, and we seized
evidence, computers or
cell phones,
and we needed to have forensic searches
conducted of the computers, or of the
cell phones,
you know where I went?
I didn't go to the Metropolitan Police
Department.
I didn't even go to the FBI lab down at
Quantico, although I used their services
regularly
for other forensic endeavors. No,
I went to the U.S. Secret Service
Forensic Science Division.
That was the unit that we
most often used
to conduct forensic searches of
cell phones.
And they were
really good
at what they did. They were especially
good
at retrieving things that had been
deleted
from cell phones, or deleted from
computers.
I'm betting they probably still are good
at what they do.
And in fact,
if you look at the U.S. Secret Service
website,
you'll see that
they think they're pretty good at what
they do.
There's the website for the Secret
Service, touting their forensic expertise:
expertise in "processing and analyzing
digital multimedia, items of evidence,
expertise in cyber forensics, which
includes
a cyber workforce of special agents and
forensic analysts dedicated to
conducting advanced computer,
mobile device -- that would be cell phones --
and vehicle infotainment systems
forensic examinations using specialized
methods, software, and equipment
and their cyber forensic teams work to
identify and secure
criminal evidence for prosecution.
I guess, except,
when they're
deleting their own
text messages that
are of
enormous investigative value.
5:33
so yes now there has to be an
5:34
investigation
5:36
to try to determine if this was a
5:39
nefarious destruction of evidence
5:42
perhaps even to try to protect donald
5:44
trump
5:46
or if it was only
5:48
a horrifically reckless
5:51
destruction of evidence by the secret
5:53
service
5:55
but regardless of the outcome of that
5:57
investigation
5:59
what has to happen now is the secret
6:01
service officers
6:03
who were texting on january 5th on
6:05
january 6th who have information and
6:08
evidence relevant
6:10
to the insurrection
6:12
they have to testify
6:16
along with mike pence
6:20
on january 6th
6:22
as trump's angry mob descended on the
6:25
capitol
6:26
as they hunted for mike pence as they
6:28
were chanting hang mike pence
6:32
the secret service tried to convince
6:35
mike pence to get in the car so they
6:37
could whisk him away
6:40
and mike pence said
6:42
those six words
6:44
that representative raskin said were
6:46
chilling i'm not getting in that car
6:52
and he didn't
6:55
mike pence
6:57
needs to testify
7:00
i would say mike pence needs to man up
7:02
but
7:03
i abandoned that phrase a long time ago
7:06
certainly when we saw heroes like
7:09
ambassador marie ivanovic
7:11
dr fiona hill most recently cassidy
7:14
hutchinson testify stand up to trump
7:18
heroically no mike pence needs to woman
7:21
up
7:23
look i know mike pence thinks he's still
7:26
in political play
7:29
right like there is some self-respecting
7:31
voter in america that would cast their
7:33
vote for mike pence
7:36
the way he
7:37
enabled donald trump's
7:40
crimes and and victimization of the
7:42
american people for four years
7:45
you know mike pence is not in political
7:48
play give it up sport but you know what
7:51
you can still salvage a little bit of
7:53
your self-respect and maybe even help
7:55
move our democracy forward by stepping
7:58
up
7:59
and testifying
8:01
testifying about that relentless
8:04
pressure campaign
8:06
by donald trump trying to get you to do
8:09
the wrong thing the unlawful thing the
8:11
unconstitutional thing the undemocratic
8:14
thing the unpatriotic thing
8:18
woman up
8:19
grow a spine
8:22
testify
8:25
because justice
8:28
matters
8:31
friends as always please stay safe
8:33
please stay tuned and i look forward to
8:35
talking with you all again
8:37
tomorrow
8:41
[Music]
8:49
you

[admin]

House panels: DHS officials interfered in effort to get lost Secret Service texts
After the inspector general’s office requested the Secret Service’s January 6 communications, the effort was shut down. The new revelations appear to show that the chief watchdog for the Secret Service and DHS took deliberate steps to stop the retrieval of texts it knew were missing.
by Hugo Lowell in Washington
the guardian
Tue 2 Aug 2022 09.46 EDT

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general’s office interfered with efforts to recover erased Secret Service texts from the time of the US Capitol attack and attempted to cover up their actions, two House committees said in a letter on Monday.

Taken together, the new revelations appear to show that the chief watchdog for the Secret Service and the DHS took deliberate steps to stop the retrieval of texts it knew were missing, and then sought to hide the fact that it had decided not to pursue that evidence.

The inspector general’s office had initially sought to retrieve the lost texts from across the DHS – spanning both the Secret Service as well as the former DHS secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli – as part of its internal review into January 6.

But six weeks after the inspector general’s office first requested Secret Service communications from the time of the Capitol attack, that effort was shut down by Thomas Kait, the deputy inspector general for inspections and evaluations, the House committees said.

“Use this email as a reference to our conversation where I said we no longer request phone records and text messages from the USSS relating to the events on January 6th,” Kait wrote in a July 2021 email to a senior DHS liaison official, Jim Crumpacker, that was obtained by Congress.

The House committees also disclosed they had learned that Kait and other senior officials manipulated a memo, authored on 4 February 2022, that originally criticized the DHS for refusing to cooperate with its investigation and emphasized the need to review certain texts.

By the time that Kait and other senior officials had finished with the memo, the House committee said, mentions about the erased texts from the Secret Service or the DHS secretary had been removed and instead praised the agency for its response to the internal review.

The memo went from being a stinging rebuke that said “most DHS components have not provided the requested information” to saying “we received a timely and consolidated response from each component”, the House committees said.

Appearing to acknowledge the removal of the damaging findings in the memo, Kait asked colleagues around that time: “Am I setting us up for anything by adding what I did? I spoke with Kristen late last week and she was ok with acknowledging the DAL’s efforts.”

The disclosures alarmed the House oversight committee chair, Carolyn Maloney, and House homeland security committee chair, Bennie Thompson – who also chairs the House January 6 committee – enough to demand that top DHS officials appear for transcribed interviews.

In the four-page letter, the two House committees again called for the recusal of the DHS inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, and demanded communications inside the inspector general’s office about not collecting or recovering texts from the agency relating to the Capitol attack.

The deepening investigation has also revealed that Cuffari’s office was notified in February 2022 that texts from Wolf and Cuccinelli could not be accessed and that Cuccinelli had been using a personal phone – yet never told Congress.

Kait has a history of removing damaging findings from reports. In a DHS report on domestic violence and sexual misconduct, Kait directed staff to remove a section that found officers accused of sexual offenses were charged with generic offenses, the New York Times reported.

The controversy over the missing texts erupted several weeks ago after Cuffari first informed Congress in mid-July that his department could not turn over Secret Service texts from the time of the Capitol attack because they had been erased as part of a device replacement program.

That prompted Thompson, through the House January 6 select committee, to issue a subpoena to the Secret Service for texts from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack as it examined how the agency intended to move Donald Trump and Mike Pence on January 6.

But the Secret Service provided only one text exchange to the select committee, the Guardian has previously reported, telling investigators that every other message had been wiped after personnel failed to back up data from the devices when they were swapped out.

[admin]

F.B.I. Searches Trump’s Home in Florida: The former president said that Mar-a-Lago had been “raided” and that authorities had even broken into a safe.
by Maggie Haberman, Ben Protess and Adam Goldman
New York Times
8/8/22

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

The search appears to be focused on materials Trump took from the White House.

Former President Donald J. Trump said on Monday that the F.B.I. had searched his Palm Beach, Fla., home and had broken open a safe — an account signaling a dramatic escalation in the various investigations into the final stages of his presidency.

The search, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, when he left the White House. Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents.

Mr. Trump delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, only doing so when there became a threat of action to retrieve them.


Former President Donald J. Trump said F.B.I. agents had searched Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and broken open a safe. Credit...MediaPunch, via Associated Press

The F.B.I. would have needed to convince a judge that it had probable cause that a crime had been committed to get a search warrant, and proceeding with a search on a former president’s home would almost surely have required sign-off from top officials at the bureau and the Justice Department.

A spokesperson for the F.B.I. declined to comment, and Justice Department officials did not initially respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Trump was in the New York area at the time of the search.

Mr. Trump, who campaigned for president in 2016 criticizing Hillary Clinton’s practice of maintaining a private email server for government-related messages while she was secretary of state, was known throughout his term to rip up official material that was intended to be held for presidential archives. One person familiar with his habits said that included classified material that was shredded in his bedroom and elsewhere.

“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Mr. Trump said, maintaining it was an effort to stop him from running for president in 2024. “Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries.”

“They even broke into my safe!” he wrote.

Mr. Trump did not share any details about what the F.B.I. agents said they were searching for.

The search took place on Monday morning, a person familiar with it said, although Mr. Trump claimed agents were still there many hours later.

The search was at least in part for whether any records remained at the club, the person familiar with the search said.

Aides to President Biden said they were stunned by the development and learned of it from Twitter.

The search came as the Justice Department has also been stepping up questioning of former Trump aides who had been witnesses to discussions and planning in the White House of Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in office after his loss in the 2020 election.

Mr. Trump has been the focus of questions asked by federal prosecutors in connection with a scheme to send “fake” electors to Congress for the certification of the Electoral College.

The current F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, was appointed by Mr. Trump.

The law governing the preservation of White House materials, the Presidential Records Act, lacks teeth, but criminal statutes can come into play, especially in the case of classified material.

Criminal codes, which carry jail time, target anyone who “willfully injures or commits any depredation against any property of the United States” and anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates or destroys” government documents.

Samuel R. Berger, a national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, pleaded guilty in 2015 to a misdemeanor charge for removing classified material from a government archive. In 2007, Donald Keyser, an Asia expert and former senior State Department official, was sentenced to prison after he confessed to keeping more than 3,000 sensitive documents — ranging from the classified to the top secret — in his basement.

In 1999, the C.I.A. announced it had suspended the security clearance of its former director, John M. Deutch, after concluding that he had improperly handled national secrets on a desktop computer at his home.

In January of this year, the archives retrieved 15 boxes that Mr. Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago from the White House residence when his term ended. The boxes included material subject to the Presidential Records Act, which requires that all documents and records pertaining to official business be turned over to the archives.

The items in the boxes included documents, mementos, gifts and letters. The archives did not describe the classified material it found other than to say that it was “classified national security information.”

Because the National Archives “identified classified information in the boxes,” the agency “has been in communication with the Department of Justice,” David S. Ferriero, the national archivist, told Congress at the time.

Federal prosecutors subsequently began a grand jury investigation, according to two people briefed on the matter. Prosecutors issued a subpoena earlier this year to the archives to obtain the boxes of classified documents, according to the two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The authorities also made interview requests to people who worked in the White House in the final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency, according to one of the people.

Mr. Trump made clear in his statement that he sees potential political value in the search, something some of his advisers echoed, depending on what any investigation produces.

Jonathan Martin, Luke Broadwater and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.

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Part 1 of 2

Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals: How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief.
by Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker
The New Yorker
August 15, 2022 Issue
August 8, 2022

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As the President’s behavior grew increasingly erratic, General Mark Milley told his staff, “I will fight from the inside.” Photo illustration by Klawe Rzeczy; Source photographs from Getty; National Archives / Newsmakers

In the summer of 2017, after just half a year in the White House, Donald Trump flew to Paris for Bastille Day celebrations thrown by Emmanuel Macron, the new French President. Macron staged a spectacular martial display to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the American entrance into the First World War. Vintage tanks rolled down the Champs-Élysées as fighter jets roared overhead. The event seemed to be calculated to appeal to Trump—his sense of showmanship and grandiosity—and he was visibly delighted. The French general in charge of the parade turned to one of his American counterparts and said, “You are going to be doing this next year.”

Sure enough, Trump returned to Washington determined to have his generals throw him the biggest, grandest military parade ever for the Fourth of July. The generals, to his bewilderment, reacted with disgust. “I’d rather swallow acid,” his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, said. Struggling to dissuade Trump, officials pointed out that the parade would cost millions of dollars and tear up the streets of the capital.

But the gulf between Trump and the generals was not really about money or practicalities, just as their endless policy battles were not only about clashing views on whether to withdraw from Afghanistan or how to combat the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran. The divide was also a matter of values, of how they viewed the United States itself. That was never clearer than when Trump told his new chief of staff, John Kelly—like Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general—about his vision for Independence Day. “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.

Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are—and they are buried over in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead interred there.

“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

The subject came up again during an Oval Office briefing that included Trump, Kelly, and Paul Selva, an Air Force general and the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kelly joked in his deadpan way about the parade. “Well, you know, General Selva is going to be in charge of organizing the Fourth of July parade,” he told the President. Trump did not understand that Kelly was being sarcastic. “So, what do you think of the parade?” Trump asked Selva. Instead of telling Trump what he wanted to hear, Selva was forthright.

“I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” Selva said. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added, “It’s not who we are.”

Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So, you don’t like the idea?” he said, incredulous.

“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”

The four years of the Trump Presidency were characterized by a fantastical degree of instability: fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals. At first, Trump, who had dodged the draft by claiming to have bone spurs, seemed enamored with being Commander-in-Chief and with the national-security officials he’d either appointed or inherited. But Trump’s love affair with “my generals” was brief, and in a statement for this article the former President confirmed how much he had soured on them over time. “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system,” he said.

It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”

“Which generals?” Kelly asked.

“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.

By late 2018, Trump wanted his own handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had tired of Joseph Dunford, a Marine general who had been appointed chairman by Barack Obama, and who worked closely with Mattis as they resisted some of Trump’s more outlandish ideas. Never mind that Dunford still had most of a year to go in his term. For months, David Urban, a lobbyist who ran the winning 2016 Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, had been urging the President and his inner circle to replace Dunford with a more like-minded chairman, someone less aligned with Mattis, who had commanded both Dunford and Kelly in the Marines.

Mattis’s candidate to succeed Dunford was David Goldfein, an Air Force general and a former F-16 fighter pilot who had been shot down in the Balkans and successfully evaded capture. No one could remember a President selecting a chairman over the objections of his Defense Secretary, but word came back to the Pentagon that there was no way Trump would accept just one recommendation. Two obvious contenders from the Army, however, declined to be considered: General Curtis Scaparrotti, the nato Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told fellow-officers that there was “no gas left in my tank” to deal with being Trump’s chairman. General Joseph Votel, the Central Command chief, also begged off, telling a colleague he was not a good fit to work so closely with Mattis.

Urban, who had attended West Point with Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and remained an Army man at heart, backed Mark Milley, the chief of staff of the Army. Milley, who was then sixty, was the son of a Navy corpsman who had served with the 4th Marine Division, in Iwo Jima. He grew up outside Boston and played hockey at Princeton. As an Army officer, Milley commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, led the 10th Mountain Division, and oversaw the Army Forces Command. A student of history who often carried a pile of the latest books on the Second World War with him, Milley was decidedly not a member of the close-knit Marine fraternity that had dominated national-security policy for Trump’s first two years. Urban told the President that he would connect better with Milley, who was loquacious and blunt to the point of being rude, and who had the Ivy League pedigree that always impressed Trump.

Milley had already demonstrated those qualities in meetings with Trump as the Army chief of staff. “Milley would go right at why it’s important for the President to know this about the Army and why the Army is the service that wins all the nation’s wars. He had all those sort of elevator-speech punch lines,” a senior defense official recalled. “He would have that big bellowing voice and be right in his face with all the one-liners, and then he would take a breath and he would say, ‘Mr. President, our Army is here to serve you. Because you’re the Commander-in-Chief.’ It was a very different approach, and Trump liked that.” And, like Trump, Milley was not a subscriber to the legend of Mad Dog Mattis, whom he considered a “complete control freak.”

Mattis, for his part, seemed to believe that Milley was inappropriately campaigning for the job, and Milley recalled to others that Mattis confronted him at a reception that fall, saying, “Hey, you shouldn’t run for office. You shouldn’t run to be the chairman.” Milley later told people that he had replied sharply to Mattis, “I’m not lobbying for any fucking thing. I don’t do that.” Milley eventually raised the issue with Dunford. “Hey, Mattis has got this in his head,” Milley told him. “I’m telling you it ain’t me.” Milley even claimed that he had begged Urban to cease promoting his candidacy.

In November, 2018, the day before Milley was scheduled for an interview with Trump, he and Mattis had another barbed encounter at the Pentagon. In Milley’s recounting of the episode later to others, Mattis urged him to tell Trump that he wanted to be the next Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, rather than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Milley said he would not do that but would instead wait to hear what the President wanted him to do. This would end whatever relationship the two generals had.

When Milley arrived at the White House the next day, he was received by Kelly, who seemed to him unusually distraught. Before they headed into the Oval Office to meet with Trump, Milley asked Kelly what he thought.

“You should go to Europe and just get the fuck out of D.C.,” Kelly said. The White House was a cesspool: “Just get as far away as you can.”

In the Oval Office, Trump said right from the start that he was considering Milley for chairman of the Joint Chiefs. When Trump offered him the job, Milley replied, “Mr. President, I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.”

For the next hour, they talked about the state of the world. Immediately, there were points of profound disagreement. On Afghanistan, Milley said he believed that a complete withdrawal of American troops, as Trump wanted, would cause a serious new set of problems. And Milley had already spoken out publicly against the banning of transgender troops, which Trump was insisting on.

“Mattis tells me you are weak on transgender,” Trump said.

“No, I am not weak on transgender,” Milley replied. “I just don’t care who sleeps with who.”

There were other differences as well, but in the end Milley assured him, “Mr. President, you’re going to be making the decisions. All I can guarantee from me is I’m going to give you an honest answer, and I’m not going to talk about it on the front page of the Washington Post. I’ll give you an honest answer on everything I can. And you’re going to make the decisions, and as long as they’re legal I’ll support it.”

As long as they’re legal. It was not clear how much that caveat even registered with Trump. The decision to name Milley was a rare chance, as Trump saw it, to get back at Mattis. Trump would confirm this years later, after falling out with both men, saying that he had picked Milley only because Mattis “could not stand him, had no respect for him, and would not recommend him.”

Late on the evening of December 7th, Trump announced that he would reveal a big personnel decision having to do with the Joint Chiefs the next day, in Philadelphia, at the hundred-and-nineteenth annual Army-Navy football game. This was all the notice Dunford had that he was about to be publicly humiliated. The next morning, Dunford was standing with Milley at the game waiting for the President to arrive when Urban, the lobbyist, showed up. Urban hugged Milley. “We did it!” Urban said. “We did it!”

But Milley’s appointment was not even the day’s biggest news. As Trump walked to his helicopter to fly to the game, he dropped another surprise. “John Kelly will be leaving toward the end of the year,” he told reporters. Kelly had lasted seventeen months in what he called “the worst fucking job in the world.”

For Trump, the decision was a turning point. Instead of installing another strong-willed White House chief of staff who might have told him no, the President gravitated toward one who would basically go along with whatever he wanted. A week later, Kelly made an unsuccessful last-ditch effort to persuade Trump not to replace him with Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina who was serving as Trump’s budget director. “You don’t want to hire someone who’s going to be a yes-man,” Kelly told the President. “I don’t give a shit anymore,” Trump replied. “I want a yes-man!”

A little more than a week after that, Mattis was out, too, having quit in protest over Trump’s order that the U.S. abruptly withdraw its forces from Syria right after Mattis had met with American allies fighting alongside the U.S. It was the first time in nearly four decades that a major Cabinet secretary had resigned over a national-security dispute with the President.

The so-called “axis of adults” was over. None of them had done nearly as much to restrain Trump as the President’s critics thought they should have. But all of them—Kelly, Mattis, Dunford, plus H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, and Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State—had served as guardrails in one way or another. Trump hoped to replace them with more malleable figures. As Mattis would put it, Trump was so out of his depth that he had decided to drain the pool.

On January 2, 2019, Kelly sent a farewell e-mail to the White House staff. He said that these were the people he would miss: “The selfless ones, who work for the American people so hard and never lowered themselves to wrestle in the mud with the pigs. The ones who stayed above the drama, put personal ambition and politics aside, and simply worked for our great country. The ones who were ethical, moral and always told their boss what he or she NEEDED to hear, as opposed to what they might have wanted to hear.”

That same morning, Mulvaney showed up at the White House for his first official day as acting chief of staff. He called an all-hands meeting and made an announcement: O.K., we’re going to do things differently. John Kelly’s gone, and we’re going to let the President be the President.

In the fall of 2019, nearly a year after Trump named him the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley finally took over the position from Dunford. Two weeks into the job, Milley sat at Trump’s side in a meeting at the White House with congressional leaders to discuss a brewing crisis in the Middle East. Trump had again ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, imperilling America’s Kurdish allies and effectively handing control of the territory over to the Syrian government and Russian military forces. The House—amid impeachment proceedings against the President for holding up nearly four hundred million dollars in security assistance to Ukraine as leverage to demand an investigation of his Democratic opponent—passed a nonbinding resolution rebuking Trump for the pullout. Even two-thirds of the House Republicans voted for it.

At the meeting, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, pointed out the vote against the President. “Congratulations,” Trump snapped sarcastically. He grew even angrier when the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, read out a warning from Mattis that leaving Syria could result in the resurgence of the Islamic State. In response, Trump derided his former Defense Secretary as “the world’s most overrated general. You know why I fired him? I fired him because he wasn’t tough enough.”

Eventually, Pelosi, in her frustration, stood and pointed at the President. “All roads with you lead to Putin,” she said. “You gave Russia Ukraine and Syria.”

“You’re just a politician, a third-rate politician!” Trump shot back.

Finally, Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader and Pelosi’s No. 2, had had enough. “This is not useful,” he said, and stood up to leave with the Speaker.

“We’ll see you at the polls,” Trump shouted as they walked out.

When she exited the White House, Pelosi told reporters that she left because Trump was having a “meltdown.” A few hours later, Trump tweeted a White House photograph of Pelosi standing over him, apparently thinking it would prove that she was the one having a meltdown. Instead, the image went viral as an example of Pelosi confronting Trump.

Milley could also be seen in the photograph, his hands clenched together, his head bowed low, looking as though he wanted to sink into the floor. To Pelosi, this was a sign of inexplicable weakness, and she would later say that she never understood why Milley had not been willing to stand up to Trump at that meeting. After all, she would point out, he was the nonpartisan leader of the military, not one of Trump’s toadies. “Milley, you would have thought, would have had more independence,” she told us, “but he just had his head down.”

In fact, Milley was already quite wary of Trump. That night, he called Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who had also been present. “Is that the way these things normally go?” Milley asked. As Smith later put it, “That was the moment when Milley realized that the boss might have a screw or two loose.” There had been no honeymoon. “From pretty much his first day on the job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Smith said, “he was very much aware of the fact that there was a challenge here that was not your normal challenge with a Commander-in-Chief.”

Early on the evening of June 1, 2020, Milley failed what he came to realize was the biggest test of his career: a short walk from the White House across Lafayette Square, minutes after it had been violently cleared of Black Lives Matter protesters. Dressed in combat fatigues, Milley marched behind Trump with a phalanx of the President’s advisers in a photo op, the most infamous of the Trump Presidency, that was meant to project a forceful response to the protests that had raged outside the White House and across the country since the killing, the week before, of George Floyd. Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.

In the morning before the Lafayette Square photo op, Trump had clashed with Milley, Attorney General William Barr, and the Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, over his demands for a militarized show of force. “We look weak,” Trump told them. The President wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and use active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted ten thousand troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne called up. He demanded that Milley take personal charge. When Milley and the others resisted and said that the National Guard would be sufficient, Trump shouted, “You are all losers! You are all fucking losers!” Turning to Milley, Trump said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Eventually, Trump was persuaded not to send in the military against American citizens. Barr, as the civilian head of law enforcement, was given the lead role in the protest response, and the National Guard was deployed to assist police. Hours later, Milley, Esper, and other officials were abruptly summoned back to the White House and sent marching across Lafayette Square. As they walked, with the scent of tear gas still in the air, Milley realized that he should not be there and made his exit, quietly peeling off to his waiting black Chevy Suburban. But the damage was done. No one would care or even remember that he was not present when Trump held up a Bible in front of the damaged church; people had already seen him striding with the President on live television in his battle dress, an image that seemed to signal that the United States under Trump was, finally, a nation at war with itself. Milley knew this was a misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a “road-to-Damascus moment,” as he would later put it. What would he do about it?

In the days after the Lafayette Square incident, Milley sat in his office at the Pentagon, writing and rewriting drafts of a letter of resignation. There were short versions of the letter; there were long versions. His preferred version was the one that read in its entirety:

I regret to inform you that I intend to resign as your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thank you for the honor of appointing me as senior ranking officer. The events of the last couple weeks have caused me to do deep soul-searching, and I can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.

Second, you are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people—and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people. The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.

Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal. All men and women are created equal, no matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or something in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose not to believe. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve.

And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.

The letter was dated June 8th, a full week after Lafayette Square, but Milley still was not sure if he should give it to Trump. He was sending up flares, seeking advice from a wide circle. He reached out to Dunford, and to mentors such as the retired Army general James Dubik, an expert on military ethics. He called political contacts as well, including members of Congress and former officials from the Bush and Obama Administrations. Most told him what Robert Gates, a former Secretary of Defense and C.I.A. chief, did: “Make them fire you. Don’t resign.”

“My sense is Mark had a pretty accurate measure of the man pretty quickly,” Gates recalled later. “He would tell me over time, well before June 1st, some of the absolutely crazy notions that were put forward in the Oval Office, crazy ideas from the President, things about using or not using military force, the immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, pulling out of South Korea. It just went on and on.”

Milley was not the only senior official to seek Gates’s counsel. Several members of Trump’s national-security team had made the pilgrimage out to his home in Washington State during the previous two years. Gates would pour them a drink, grill them some salmon, and help them wrestle with the latest Trump conundrum. “The problem with resignation is you can only fire that gun once,” he told them. All the conversations were variations on a theme: “ ‘How do I walk us back from the ledge?’ ‘How do I keep this from happening, because it would be a terrible thing for the country?’ ”

After Lafayette Square, Gates told both Milley and Esper that, given Trump’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior, they needed to stay in the Pentagon as long as they could. “If you resign, it’s a one-day story,” Gates told them. “If you’re fired, it makes it clear you were standing up for the right thing.” Gates advised Milley that he had another important card and urged him to play it: “Keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go they all go, so that the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.”

Publicly, Lafayette Square looked like a debacle for Milley. Several retired generals had condemned his participation, pointing out that the leader of a racially diverse military, with more than two hundred thousand active-duty Black troops, could not be seen opposing a movement for racial justice. Even Mattis, who had refrained from openly criticizing Trump, issued a statement about the “bizarre photo op.” The Washington Post reported that Mattis had been motivated to do so by his anger at the image of Milley parading through the square in his fatigues.

Whatever their personal differences, Mattis and Milley both knew that there was a tragic inevitability to the moment. Throughout his Presidency, Trump had sought to redefine the role of the military in American public life. In his 2016 campaign, he had spoken out in support of the use of torture and other practices that the military considered war crimes. Just before the 2018 midterms, he ordered thousands of troops to the southern border to combat a fake “invasion” by a caravan of migrants. In 2019, in a move that undermined military justice and the chain of command, he gave clemency to a Navy seal found guilty of posing with the dead body of a captive in Iraq.

Many considered Trump’s 2018 decision to use the military in his preëlection border stunt to be “the predicate—or the harbinger—of 2020,” in the words of Peter Feaver, a Duke University expert on civil-military relations, who taught the subject to generals at command school. When Milley, who had been among Feaver’s students, called for advice after Lafayette Square, Feaver agreed that Milley should apologize but encouraged him not to resign. “It would have been a mistake,” Feaver said. “We have no tradition of resignation in protest amongst the military.”

Milley decided to apologize in a commencement address at the National Defense University that he was scheduled to deliver the week after the photo op. Feaver’s counsel was to own up to the error and make it clear that the mistake was his and not Trump’s. Presidents, after all, “are allowed to do political stunts,” Feaver said. “That’s part of being President.”

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Part 2 of 2

Milley’s apology was unequivocal. “I should not have been there,” he said in the address. He did not mention Trump. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” It was, he added, “a mistake that I have learned from.”

At the same time, Milley had finally come to a decision. He would not quit. “Fuck that shit,” he told his staff. “I’ll just fight him.” The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his Commander-in-Chief. Yet the Constitution offered no practical guide for a general faced with a rogue President. Never before since the position had been created, in 1949—or at least since Richard Nixon’s final days, in 1974—had a chairman of the Joint Chiefs encountered such a situation. “If they want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it,” Milley told his staff. “But I will fight from the inside.”

Milley’s apology tour was private as well as public. With the upcoming election fuelling Trump’s sense of frenetic urgency, the chairman sought to get the message to Democrats that he would not go along with any further efforts by the President to deploy the machinery of war for domestic political ends. He called both Pelosi and Schumer. “After the Lafayette Square episode, Milley was extremely contrite and communicated to any number of people that he had no intention of playing Trump’s game any longer,” Bob Bauer, the former Obama White House counsel, who was then advising Joe Biden’s campaign and heard about the calls, said. “He was really burned by that experience. He was appalled. He apologized for it, and it was pretty clear he was digging his heels in.”

On Capitol Hill, however, some Democrats, including Pelosi, remained skeptical. To them, Lafayette Square proved that Milley had been a Trumpist all along. “There was a huge misunderstanding about Milley,” Adam Smith, the House Armed Services Committee chairman, recalled. “A lot of my Democratic colleagues after June 1st in particular were concerned about him.” Smith tried to assure other Democrats that “there was never a single solitary moment where it was possible that Milley was going to help Trump do anything that shouldn’t be done.”

And yet Pelosi, among others, also distrusted Milley because of an incident earlier that year in which Trump ordered the killing of the Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani without briefing congressional leaders in advance. Smith said Pelosi believed that the chairman had been “evasive” and disrespectful to Congress. Milley, for his part, felt he could not disregard Trump’s insistence that lawmakers not be notified—a breach that was due to the President’s pique over the impeachment proceedings against him. “The navigation of Trumpworld was more difficult for Milley than Nancy gives him credit for,” Smith said. He vouched for the chairman but never managed to convince Pelosi.

How long could this standoff between the Pentagon and the President go on? For the next few months, Milley woke up each morning not knowing whether he would be fired before the day was over. His wife told him she was shocked that he had not been cashiered outright when he made his apology.

Esper was also on notice. Two days after Lafayette Square, the Defense Secretary had gone to the Pentagon pressroom and offered his own apology, even revealing his opposition to Trump’s demands to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the active-duty military. Such a step, Esper said, should be reserved only for “the most urgent and dire of situations.” Trump later exploded at Esper in the Oval Office about the criticism, delivering what Milley would recall as “the worst reaming out” he had ever heard.

The next day, Trump’s latest chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called the Defense Secretary at home—three times—to get him to recant his opposition to invoking the Insurrection Act. When he refused, Meadows took “the Tony Soprano approach,” as Esper later put it, and began threatening him, before eventually backing off. (A spokesperson for Meadows disputed Esper’s account.) Esper resolved to stay in office as long as he could, “to endure all the shit and run the clock out,” as he put it. He felt that he had a particular responsibility to hold on. By law, the only person authorized to deploy troops other than the President is the Secretary of Defense. Esper was determined not to hand that power off to satraps such as Robert O’Brien, who had become Trump’s fourth and final national-security adviser, or Ric Grenell, a former public-relations man who had been serving as acting director of National Intelligence.

Both Esper and Milley found new purpose in waiting out the President. They resisted him throughout the summer, as Trump repeatedly demanded that active-duty troops quash ongoing protests, threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, and tried to stop the military from renaming bases honoring Confederate generals. “They both expected, literally on a daily basis, to be fired,” Gates recalled. Milley “would call me and essentially say, ‘I may not last until tomorrow night.’ And he was comfortable with that. He felt like he knew he was going to support the Constitution, and there were no two ways about it.”

Milley put away the resignation letter in his desk and drew up a plan, a guide for how to get through the next few months. He settled on four goals: First, make sure Trump did not start an unnecessary war overseas. Second, make sure the military was not used in the streets against the American people for the purpose of keeping Trump in power. Third, maintain the military’s integrity. And, fourth, maintain his own integrity. In the months to come, Milley would refer back to the plan more times than he could count.

Even in June, Milley understood that it was not just a matter of holding off Trump until after the Presidential election, on November 3rd. He knew that Election Day might well mark merely the beginning, not the end, of the challenges Trump would pose. The portents were worrisome. Barely one week before Lafayette Square, Trump had posted a tweet that would soon become a refrain. The 2020 Presidential race, he warned for the first time, would end up as “the greatest Rigged Election in history.”

By the evening of Monday, November 9th, Milley’s fears about a volatile post-election period unlike anything America had seen before seemed to be coming true. News organizations had called the election for Biden, but Trump refused to acknowledge that he had lost by millions of votes. The peaceful transition of power—a cornerstone of liberal democracy—was now in doubt. Sitting at home that night at around nine, the chairman received an urgent phone call from the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. With the possible exception of Vice-President Mike Pence, no one had been more slavishly loyal in public, or more privately obsequious, to Trump than Pompeo. But even he could not take it anymore.

“We’ve got to talk,” Pompeo told Milley, who was at home in Quarters Six, the red brick house that has been the official residence of chairmen of the Joint Chiefs since the early nineteen-sixties. “Can I come over?”

Milley invited Pompeo to visit immediately.

“The crazies have taken over,” Pompeo told him when they sat down at Milley’s kitchen table. Not only was Trump surrounded by the crazies; they were, in fact, ascendant in the White House and, as of that afternoon, inside the Pentagon itself. Just a few hours earlier, on the first workday after the election was called for Biden, Trump had finally fired Esper. Milley and Pompeo were alarmed that the Defense Secretary was being replaced by Christopher Miller, until recently an obscure mid-level counterterrorism official at Trump’s National Security Council, who had arrived at the Pentagon flanked by a team of what appeared to be Trump’s political minders.

For Milley, this was an ominous development. From the beginning, he understood that “if the idea was to seize power,” as he told his staff, “you are not going to do this without the military.” Milley had studied the history of coups. They invariably required the takeover of what he referred to as the “power ministries”—the military, the national police, and the interior forces.

As soon as he’d heard about Esper’s ouster, Milley had rushed upstairs to the Secretary’s office. “This is complete bullshit,” he told Esper. Milley said that he would resign in protest. “You can’t,” Esper insisted. “You’re the only one left.” Once he cooled off, Milley agreed.

In the coming weeks, Milley would repeatedly convene the Joint Chiefs, to bolster their resolve to resist any dangerous political schemes from the White House now that Esper was out. He quoted Benjamin Franklin to them on the virtues of hanging together rather than hanging separately. He told his staff that, if need be, he and all the chiefs were prepared to “put on their uniforms and go across the river together”—to threaten to quit en masse—to prevent Trump from trying to use the military to stay in power illegally.

Soon after Miller arrived at the Pentagon, Milley met with him. “First things first here,” he told the new acting Defense Secretary, who had spent the previous few months running the National Counterterrorism Center. “You are one of two people in the United States now with the capability to launch nuclear weapons.”

A Pentagon official who had worked closely with Miller had heard a rumor about him potentially replacing Esper more than a week before the election. “My first instinct was this is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard,” the official recalled. But then he remembered how Miller had changed in the Trump White House. “He’s inclined to be a bit of a sail, and as the wind blows he will flap in that direction,” the official said. “He’s not an ideologue. He’s just a guy willing to do their bidding.” By coincidence, the official happened to be walking into the Pentagon just as Miller was entering—a video of Miller tripping on the stairs soon made the rounds. Accompanying him were three men who would, for a few weeks, at least, have immense influence over the most powerful military in the world: Kash Patel, Miller’s new chief of staff; Ezra Cohen, who would ascend to acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security; and Anthony Tata, a retired general and a talking head on Fox News, who would become the Pentagon’s acting head of policy.

It was an extraordinary trio. Tata’s claims to fame were calling Obama a “terrorist leader”—an assertion he later retracted—and alleging that a former C.I.A. director had threatened to assassinate Trump. Patel, a former aide to Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, had been accused of spreading conspiracy theories claiming that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 election. Both Trump’s third national-security adviser, John Bolton, and Bolton’s deputy, Charles Kupperman, had vociferously objected to putting Patel on the National Security Council staff, backing down only when told that it was a personal, “must-hire” order from the President. Still, Patel found his way around them to deal with Trump directly, feeding him packets of information on Ukraine, which was outside his portfolio, according to testimony during Trump’s first impeachment. (In a statement for this article, Patel called the allegations a “total fabrication.”) Eventually, Patel was sent to help Ric Grenell carry out a White House-ordered purge of the intelligence community.

Cohen, who had worked earlier in his career at the Defense Intelligence Agency under Michael Flynn, had initially been hired at the Trump National Security Council in 2017 but was pushed out after Flynn’s swift implosion as Trump’s first national-security adviser. When efforts were later made to rehire Cohen in the White House, Bolton’s deputy vowed to “put my badge on the table” and quit. “I am not going to hire somebody that is going to be another cancer in the organization, and Ezra is cancer,” Kupperman bluntly told Trump. In the spring of 2020, Cohen landed at the Pentagon, and following Trump’s post-election shakeup he assumed the top intelligence post at the Pentagon.

Milley had firsthand reason to be wary of these new Pentagon advisers. Just before the election, he and Pompeo were infuriated when a top-secret Navy seal Team 6 rescue mission to free an American hostage held in Nigeria nearly had to be cancelled at the last minute. The Nigerians had not formally approved the mission in advance, as required, despite Patel’s assurances. “Planes were already in the air and we didn’t have the approvals,” a senior State Department official recalled. The rescue team was kept circling while diplomats tried to track down their Nigerian counterparts. They managed to find them only minutes before the planes would have had to turn back. As a result, the official said, both Pompeo and Milley, who believed he had been personally lied to, “assigned ill will to that whole cabal.” The C.I.A. refused to have anything to do with Patel, Pompeo recalled to his State Department staff, and they should be cautious as well. “The Secretary thought these people were just wackadoodles, nuts, and dangerous,” a second senior State Department official said. (Patel denied their accounts, asserting, “I caused no delay at all.”)

After Esper’s firing, Milley summoned Patel and Cohen separately to his office to deliver stern lectures. Whatever machinations they were up to, he told each of them, “life looks really shitty from behind bars. And, whether you want to realize it or not, there’s going to be a President at exactly 1200 hours on the twentieth and his name is Joe Biden. And, if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.” Cohen denied that Milley said this to him, insisting it was a “very friendly, positive conversation.” Patel also denied it, asserting, “He worked for me, not the other way around.” But Milley told his staff that he warned both Cohen and Patel that they were being watched: “Don’t do it, don’t even try to do it. I can smell it. I can see it. And so can a lot of other people. And, by the way, the military will have no part of this shit.”

Part of the new team’s agenda soon became clear: making sure Trump fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to withdraw American troops from the “endless wars” overseas. Two days after Esper was fired, Patel slid a piece of paper across the desk to Milley during a meeting with him and Miller. It was an order, with Trump’s trademark signature in black Sharpie, decreeing that all four thousand five hundred remaining troops in Afghanistan be withdrawn by January 15th, and that a contingent of fewer than a thousand troops on a counterterrorism mission in Somalia be pulled out by December 31st.

Milley was stunned. “Where’d you get this?” he said.

Patel said that it had just come from the White House.

“Did you advise the President to do this?” he asked Patel, who said no.

“Did you advise the President to do this?” he asked Miller, who said no.

“Well, then, who advised the President to do it?” Milley asked. “By law, I’m the President’s adviser on military action. How does this happen without me rendering my military opinion and advice?”

With that, he announced that he was putting on his dress uniform and going to the White House, where Milley and the others ended up in the office of the national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien.

“Where did this come from?” Milley demanded, putting the withdrawal order on O’Brien’s desk.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen that before,” O’Brien said. “It doesn’t look like a White House memo.”

Keith Kellogg, a retired general serving as Pence’s national-security adviser, asked to see the document. “This is not the President,” he said. “The format’s not right. This is not done right.”

“Keith, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Milley said. “You’re telling me that someone’s forging the President of the United States’ signature?”

The order, it turned out, was not fake. It was the work of a rogue operation inside Trump’s White House overseen by Johnny McEntee, Trump’s thirty-year-old personnel chief, and supported by the President himself. The order had been drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and a Trump favorite from his television appearances, working with a junior McEntee aide. The order was then brought to the President, bypassing the national-security apparatus and Trump’s own senior officials, to get him to sign it.

Macgregor often appeared on Fox News demanding an exit from Afghanistan and accused Trump’s advisers of blocking the President from doing what he wanted. “He needs to send everyone out of the Oval Office who keeps telling him, ‘If you do that and something bad happens, it’s going to be blamed on you, Mr. President,’ ” Macgregor had told Tucker Carlson in January. “He needs to say, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ ”

On the day that Esper was fired, McEntee had invited Macgregor to his office, offered him a job as the new acting Defense Secretary’s senior adviser, and handed him a handwritten list of four priorities that, as Axios reported, McEntee claimed had come directly from Trump:

1. Get us out of Afghanistan.
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.

Once the Afghanistan order was discovered, Trump’s advisers persuaded the President to back off, reminding him that he had already approved a plan for leaving over the following few months. “Why do we need a new plan?” Pompeo asked. Trump relented, and O’Brien then told the rest of the rattled national-security leadership that the order was “null and void.”

The compromise, however, was a new order that codified the drawdown to twenty-five hundred troops in Afghanistan by mid-January, which Milley and Esper had been resisting, and a reduction in the remaining three thousand troops in Iraq as well. The State Department was given one hour to notify leaders of those countries before the order was released.

Two nightmare scenarios kept running through Milley’s mind. One was that Trump might spark an external crisis, such as a war with Iran, to divert attention or to create a pretext for a power grab at home. The other was that Trump would manufacture a domestic crisis to justify ordering the military into the streets to prevent the transfer of power. Milley feared that Trump’s “Hitler-like” embrace of his own lies about the election would lead him to seek a “Reichstag moment.” In 1933, Hitler had seized on a fire in the German parliament to take control of the country. Milley now envisioned a declaration of martial law or a Presidential invocation of the Insurrection Act, with Trumpian Brown Shirts fomenting violence.

By late November, amid Trump’s escalating attacks on the election, Milley and Pompeo’s coöperation had deepened—a fact that the Secretary of State revealed to Attorney General Bill Barr over dinner on the night of December 1st. Barr had just publicly broken with Trump, telling the Associated Press in an interview that there was no evidence of election fraud sufficient to overturn the results. As they ate at an Italian restaurant in a Virginia strip mall, Barr recounted for Pompeo what he called “an eventful day.” And Pompeo told Barr about the extraordinary arrangement he had proposed to Milley to make sure that the country was in steady hands until the Inauguration: they would hold daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows. Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the “land the plane” phone calls.

“Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the twentieth of January,” Milley told his staff. “This is our obligation to this nation.” There was a problem, however. “Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.”

In public, Pompeo remained his staunchly pro-Trump self. The day after his secret visit to Milley’s house to commiserate about “the crazies” taking over, in fact, he refused to acknowledge Trump’s defeat, snidely telling reporters, “There will be a smooth transition—to a second Trump Administration.” Behind the scenes, however, Pompeo accepted that the election was over and made it clear that he would not help overturn the result. “He was totally against it,” a senior State Department official recalled. Pompeo cynically justified this jarring contrast between what he said in public and in private. “It was important for him to not get fired at the end, too, to be there to the bitter end,” the senior official said.

Both Milley and Pompeo were angered by the bumbling team of ideologues that Trump had sent to the Pentagon after the firing of Esper, a West Point classmate of Pompeo’s. The two, who were “already converging as fellow-travellers,” as one of the State officials put it, worked even more closely together as their alarm about Trump’s post-election conduct grew, although Milley was under no illusions about the Secretary of State. He believed that Pompeo, a longtime enabler of Trump who aspired to run for President himself, wanted “a second political life,” but that Trump’s final descent into denialism was the line that, at last, he would not cross. “At the end, he wouldn’t be a party to that craziness,” Milley told his staff. By early December, as they were holding their 8 a.m. land-the-plane calls, Milley was confident that Pompeo was genuinely trying to achieve a peaceful handover of power to Biden. But he was never sure what to make of Meadows. Was the chief of staff trying to land the plane or to hijack it?

Most days, Milley would also call the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who was hardly a usual interlocutor for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In the final weeks of the Administration, Cipollone, a true believer in Trump’s conservative agenda, was a principal actor in the near-daily drama over Trump’s various schemes to overturn his election defeat. After getting off one call with Cipollone, Milley told a visitor that the White House counsel was “constructive,” “not crazy,” and a force for “trying to keep guardrails around the President.”

Milley continued to reach out to Democrats close to Biden to assure them that he would not allow the military to be misused to keep Trump in power. One regular contact was Susan Rice, the former Obama national-security adviser, dubbed by Democrats the Rice Channel. He also spoke several times with Senator Angus King, an Independent from Maine. “My conversations with him were about the danger of some attempt to use the military to declare martial law,” King said. He took it upon himself to reassure fellow-senators. “I can’t tell you why I know this,” but the military will absolutely do the right thing, he would tell them, citing Milley’s “character and honesty.”

Milley had increasing reason to fear that such a choice might actually be forced upon him. In late November, Trump pardoned Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russia. Soon afterward, Flynn publicly suggested several extreme options for Trump: he could invoke martial law, appoint a special counsel, and authorize the military to “rerun” an election in the swing states. On December 18th, Trump hosted Flynn and a group of other election deniers in the Oval Office, where, for the first time in American history, a President would seriously entertain using the military to overturn an election. They brought with them a draft of a proposed Presidential order requiring the acting Defense Secretary—Christopher Miller—to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” voting machines and provide a final assessment of any findings in sixty days, well after the Inauguration was to take place. Later that night, Trump sent out a tweet beckoning his followers to descend on the capital to help him hold on to office. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” he wrote at 1:42 a.m. “Be there, will be wild!”

Milley’s fears of a coup no longer seemed far-fetched.

While Trump was being lobbied by “the crazies” to order troops to intervene at home, Milley and his fellow-generals were concerned that he would authorize a strike against Iran. For much of his Presidency, Trump’s foreign-policy hawks had agitated for a showdown with Iran; they accelerated their efforts when they realized that Trump might lose the election. In early 2020, when Mike Pence advocated taking tough measures, Milley asked why. “Because they are evil,” Pence said. Milley recalled replying, “Mr. Vice-President, there’s a lot of evil in the world, but we don’t go to war against all of it.” Milley grew even more nervous before the election, when he heard a senior official tell Trump that if he lost he should strike Iran’s nuclear program. At the time, Milley told his staff that it was a “What the fuck are these guys talking about?” moment. Now it seemed frighteningly possible.

Robert O’Brien, the national-security adviser, had been another frequent cheerleader for tough measures: “Mr. President, we should hit ’em hard, hit ’em hard with everything we have.” Esper, in his memoir, called “hit them hard” O’Brien’s “tedious signature phrase.” (O’Brien disputed this, saying, “The quote attributed to me is not accurate.”)

In the week of Esper’s firing, Milley was called to the White House to present various military options for attacking Iran and encountered a disturbing performance by Miller, the new acting Defense Secretary. Miller later told Jonathan Karl, of ABC, that he had intentionally acted like a “fucking madman” at the meeting, just three days into his tenure, pushing various escalatory scenarios for responding to Iran’s breakout nuclear capacities.

Miller’s behavior did not look intentional so much as unhelpful to Milley, as Trump kept asking for alternatives, including an attack inside Iran on its ballistic-weapons sites. Milley explained that this would be an illegal preëmptive act: “If you attack the mainland of Iran, you will be starting a war.” During another clash with Trump’s more militant advisers, when Trump was not present, Milley was even more explicit. “If we do what you’re saying,” he said, “we are all going to be tried as war criminals in The Hague.”

Trump often seemed more bluster than bite, and the Pentagon brass still believed that he did not want an all-out war, yet he continued pushing for a missile strike on Iran even after that November meeting. If Trump said it once, Milley told his staff, he said it a thousand times. “The thing he was most worried about was Iran,” a senior Biden adviser who spoke with Milley recalled. “Milley had had the experience more than once of having to walk the President off the ledge when it came to retaliating.”

The biggest fear was that Iran would provoke Trump, and, using an array of diplomatic and military channels, American officials warned the Iranians not to exploit the volatile domestic situation in the U.S. “There was a distinct concern that Iran would take advantage of this to strike at us in some way,” Adam Smith, the House Armed Services chairman, recalled.

Among those pushing the President to hit Iran before Biden’s Inauguration, Milley believed, was the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. On December 18th, the same day that Trump met with Flynn to discuss instituting martial law, Milley met with Netanyahu at his home in Jerusalem to personally urge him to back off with Trump. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley told him.

Two days later, on December 20th, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq fired nearly two dozen rockets at the American Embassy in Baghdad. Trump responded by publicly blaming Iran and threatening major retaliation if so much as a single American was killed. It was the largest attack on the Green Zone in more than a decade, and exactly the sort of provocation Milley had been dreading.

During the holidays, tensions with Iran escalated even more as the first anniversary of the American killing of Suleimani approached. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that “those who ordered the murder of General Soleimani” would “be punished.” Late on the afternoon of Sunday, January 3rd, Trump met with Milley, Miller, and his other national-security advisers on Iran. Pompeo and Milley discussed a worrisome new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. But, by the end, even Pompeo and O’Brien, the Iran hawks, opposed a military strike at this late hour in Trump’s Presidency. “He realized the clock ran out,” Milley told his staff. Trump, consumed with his election fight, backed off.

At the end of the meeting with his security chiefs, the President pulled Miller aside and asked him if he was ready for the upcoming January 6th protest. “It’s going to be a big deal,” Milley heard Trump tell Miller. “You’ve got enough people to make sure it’s safe for my people, right?” Miller assured him he did. This was the last time that Milley would ever see Trump.

On January 6th, Milley was in his office at the Pentagon meeting with Christine Wormuth, the lead Biden transition official for the Defense Department. In the weeks since the election, Milley had started displaying four networks at once on a large monitor across from the round table where he and Wormuth sat: CNN and Fox News, as well as the small pro-Trump outlets Newsmax and One America News Network, which had been airing election disinformation that even Fox would not broadcast. “You’ve got to know what the enemy is up to,” Milley had joked when Wormuth noticed his viewing habits at one of their meetings.

Milley and Wormuth that day were supposed to discuss the Pentagon’s plans to draw down U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as the Biden team’s hopes to mobilize large-scale covid vaccination sites around the country. But, as they realized in horror what was transpiring on the screen in front of them, Milley was summoned to an urgent meeting with Miller and Ryan McCarthy, the Secretary of the Army. They had not landed the plane, after all. The plane was crashing.

Milley entered the Defense Secretary’s office at 2:30 p.m., and they discussed deploying the D.C. National Guard and mobilizing National Guard units from nearby states and federal agents under the umbrella of the Justice Department. Miller issued an order at 3:04 p.m. to send in the D.C. Guard.

But it was too late to prevent the humiliation: Congress had been overwhelmed by a mob of election deniers, white-supremacist militia members, conspiracy theorists, and Trump loyalists. Milley worried that this truly was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” the crisis that would allow the President to invoke martial law and maintain his grip on power.

From the secure facility at Fort McNair, where they had been brought by their protective details, congressional leaders called on the Pentagon to send forces to the Capitol immediately. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were suspicious of Miller: Whose side was this unknown Trump appointee on? Milley tried to reassure the Democratic leadership that the uniformed military was on the case, and not there to do Trump’s bidding. The Guard, he told them, was coming.

It was already after three-thirty by then, however, and the congressional leaders were furious that it was taking so long. They also spoke with Mike Pence, who offered to call the Pentagon as well. He reached Miller around 4 p.m., with Milley still in his office listening in. “Clear the Capitol,” Pence ordered.

Although it was the Vice-President who was seeking to defend the Capitol, Meadows wanted to pretend that Trump was the one taking action. He called Milley, telling him, “We have to kill the narrative that the Vice-President is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that the President is still in charge.” Milley later dismissed Meadows, whose spokesperson denied Milley’s account, as playing “politics, politics, politics.”

The Guard finally arrived at the Capitol by 5:40 p.m., “sprint speed” for the military, as Milley would put it, but not nearly fast enough for some members of Congress, who would spend months investigating why it took so long. By 7 p.m., a perimeter had been set up outside the Capitol, and F.B.I. and A.T.F. agents were going door to door in the Capitol’s many hideaways and narrow corridors, searching for any remaining rioters.

That night, waiting for Congress to return and formally ratify Trump’s electoral defeat, Milley called one of his contacts on the Biden team. He explained that he had spoken with Meadows and Pat Cipollone at the White House, and that he had been on the phone with Pence and the congressional leaders as well. But Milley never heard from the Commander-in-Chief, on a day when the Capitol was overrun by a hostile force for the first time since the War of 1812. Trump, he said, was both “shameful” and “complicit.”

Later, Milley would often think back to that awful day. “It was a very close-run thing,” the historically minded chairman would say, invoking the famous line of the Duke of Wellington after he had only narrowly defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Trump and his men had failed in their execution of the plot, failed in part by failing to understand that Milley and the others had never been Trump’s generals and never would be. But their attack on the election had exposed a system with glaring weaknesses. “They shook the very Republic to the core,” Milley would eventually reflect. “Can you imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could have done?” ♦

This is drawn from “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.”

An earlier version of this article mistakenly attributed a quote to Mark Esper’s book.

Published in the print edition of the August 15, 2022, issue, with the headline “Trump’s Last General.”

[admin]

‘Trump Knows What The FBI Found’ In Search Of FL Home
by Lawrence O'Donnell
MSNBC
Aug 10, 2022

Donald Trump will not release what the FBI took from his Florida home. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell explains why Trump and his allies refuse to tell the truth about the search warrant carried out by the FBI.



>> WELL, DONALD TRUMP CAN'T
0:13
STOP EMAILING ME.
0:14
HE JUST EMAILED ME AGAIN, JUST
0:16
ABOUT AN HOUR AND A HALF AGO.
0:18
THIS ONE REALLY URGENT.
0:20
THE EMAIL SAYS BREAKING LIKE
0:23
BREAKING NEWS.
0:23
AND IT'S FROM IT SAYS THE ONLY
0:26
OF EMAILS FROM OFFICIAL DONALD
0:29
J TRUMP.
0:29
THIS EMAIL RIGHT HERE ON MY
0:31
PHONE.
0:31
IT SAYS, BREAKING, THE
0:35
DEMOCRATS BROKE INTO THE HOME
0:37
OF PRESIDENT DONALD J TRUMP.
0:40
THERE IT IS WE CAN PUT IT UP ON
0:42
THE SCREEN THIS EMAIL THAT I
0:43
JUST GOT.
0:44
TO ME, IT'S VERY PERSONAL.
0:47
IT SAYS LAWRENCE, THE RADICAL
0:50
LEFT IS CORRUPT.
0:50
THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO STAND
0:52
WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP.
0:54
PLEASE RUSH A DONATION
0:56
IMMEDIATELY TO PUBLICLY STAND
0:58
WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP AGAINST
0:59
THIS NEVER ENDING WITCH HUNT.
1:02
THIS IS TO ONE OF MY MANY EMAIL
1:04
ADDRESSES.
1:05
IT'S ACTUALLY THE LEAST EMAIL
1:07
ADDRESS USED WHICH SOMEHOW THE
1:09
TRUMP EMAIL MANAGERS HAVE FOUND
1:12
AND THEY ARE SUGGESTING ONCE
1:13
AGAIN THE SAME CONTRIBUTION
1:14
THEY SUGGESTED LAST NIGHT.
1:16
THEY ARE SUGGESTING $45.
1:18
THEY FIGURE THAT'S WHERE I'M
1:19
GOOD FOR.
1:20
ON THE STEELE IT'S $45.
1:22
BUT THERE IS THAT PROBLEM
1:24
DEADLINE THAT'S RIGHT THERE ON
1:25
THE SCREEN.
1:26
THE DEADLINE WHICH IS RIGHT
1:27
UNDER THE 45 DOLLAR SUGGESTION,
1:29
THE DEADLINE IS IMMEDIATELY.
1:31
NOW I AM BAD WITH ANY DEADLINE
1:34
BUT IMMEDIATELY?
1:35
THAT IS JUST NO KIND OF
1:38
DEADLINE THAT I CAN WORK WITH,
1:41
SO THEY WILL KEEP SPENDING
1:44
THEIR EMAIL BUDGET SENDING
1:47
EMAILS TO ME TO RAISE MONEY FOR
1:50
DONALD TRUMP TO DO WHAT'S WITH
1:52
IT?
1:52
WHAT'S GONNA DO WITH IT?
1:53
AND HE'S RAISING MONEY BECAUSE
1:58
WHEN THE FBI RAIDED HIS HOME.
2:01
THE FBI RAIDS HIS HOME AND THEY
2:04
DO IT SECRETLY, THE FBI TELLS
2:06
NO ONE DONALD TRUMP'S RESPONSE
2:08
IS TO TELL EVERYONE.
2:10
THAT'S HOW WE KNOW IT AND THEN
2:12
TO RUSH OUT EMAILS RAISING
2:15
MONEY ON THE FACT THAT THE FBI
2:19
EXECUTED A SEARCH WARRANT AT
2:20
HIS HOME.
2:21
WE'VE HAD 48 HOURS OF PUBLIC
2:25
COMMENT SINCE THE FBI SURPRISED
2:28
DONALD TRUMP BY EXECUTING THAT
2:31
SEARCH WARRANT AT HIS FLORIDA
2:32
HOME AND WE WILL NOW PRESENT TO
2:36
YOU EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN
2:40
STATEMENT ABOUT THAT SEARCH
2:42
WARRANT THAT IS TRUE.
2:45
SO, HERE ARE ALL THE REPUBLICAN
2:50
STATEMENTS ABOUT THE TRUMP
2:52
SEARCH WARRANT THAT ARE TRUE.
3:00
SORRY.
3:03
NONE, NOT ONE.
3:05
I WOULD HAPPILY SIT AT THIS
3:09
DESK AND READ TO YOU EVERY TWO
3:12
STATEMENT BY ANY REPUBLICAN
3:15
ANYWHERE ABOUT THE TRUMP SEARCH
3:18
WORK IF THERE WERE ANY.
3:21
THERE IS NOT A SINGLE TRUE
3:24
STATEMENT MADE BY A REPUBLICAN
3:27
ABOUT THE SEARCH WARRANT.
3:28
NOW IN FAIRNESS MOST REPUBLICAN
3:32
MEMBERS OF CONGRESS HAVE
3:33
MANAGED TO SAY ABSOLUTELY
3:36
NOTHING ABOUT IT.
3:36
REPUBLICAN SENATOR MITT ROMNEY
3:40
IS TYPICAL.
3:42
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE REPORTS
3:44
THAT SENATOR MITT ROMNEY DID
3:45
NOT RESPOND SEEKING REQUESTS TO
3:47
COMMENT.
3:47
BUT EVERY REPUBLICAN WHO HOPES
3:49
TO BE PRESIDENT SUNDAY HAS HAD
3:51
SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT
3:53
INCLUDING YALE LAW SCHOOL
3:55
GRADUATE JOSH HOLLOWAY AT
3:58
HARVARD LAW SCHOOL GRADUATE'S
4:02
SENATOR TED CRUZ.
4:02
HE CALLED THE FBI PARTISAN
4:04
ATTACK DOGS FOR DEMOCRATS, THAT
4:07
WAS HIS PHRASE WITHOUT
4:08
MENTIONING THE FBI DIRECTOR
4:11
CHRISTOPHER WRAY IS A
4:12
REPUBLICAN APPOINTED BY DONALD
4:14
TRUMP.
4:14
SENATOR CRUZ SIMPLY LIED ABOUT
4:17
THE SEARCH WARRANT AND THE FBI.
4:19
SENATOR HAWLEY OFFERED A
4:22
CHILDISH COMMENT THAT MERRICK
4:24
GARLAND MUST RESIGN AND, THAT
4:27
CHRISTOPHER WRAY MUST BE
4:28
REMOVED FROM OFFICE.
4:29
AND SENATOR HAWLEY SAID
4:32
SOMETHING THAT HAS BEEN ECHOED
4:33
BY OTHER REPUBLICANS.
4:34
SENATOR HALLE SAID QUOTE, THE
4:37
SEARCH WARRANT MUST BE
4:39
PUBLISHED.
4:40
THE REPUBLICAN DEMAND THAT THE
4:42
SEARCH WARRANT BE MADE PUBLIC
4:44
BE DESCRIBED AS DEAFENING BY A
4:48
CNN REPORTER ONLINE.
4:49
DEAFENING.
4:51
AND NOT ONE OF THOSE
4:54
REPUBLICANS IS DEMANDING THAT
4:57
DONALD TRUMP REVEAL BUT THE FBI
5:00
TOOK FROM HIS HOME.
5:02
DONALD TRUMP WAS GIVEN A
5:04
RECEIPT OF SORTS FOR WHAT WAS
5:06
TAKEN BY THE FBI.
5:08
HE COULD MAKE THAT PUBLIC RIGHT
5:10
NOW AND SATISFY THE DEAFENING
5:15
DEMANDS BY REPUBLICANS TO
5:18
REVEAL THE PURPOSE OF THE FBI
5:19
SEARCH WARRANT.
5:21
DONALD TRUMP HAS CHOSEN TO LIE
5:23
ABOUT THE SURGE INSTEAD,
5:25
SUGGESTING THAT THE FBI PLANTED
5:28
EVIDENCE, THAT THEY WILL NOW
5:30
CLAIM THEY FOUND THEIR.
5:31
NOW THAT GOT INSTANTLY EMBRACED
5:35
BY THE MOST CRAVEN TRUMP
5:39
SUPPORTERS LIKE SENATOR RAND
5:41
TOLD AND EVERYONE AT THE FOX
5:43
PROPAGANDA CHANNEL.
5:43
DONALD TRUMP KNOWS WHAT THE FBI
5:46
FOUND.
5:46
DONALD TRUMP KNOWS THAT WHAT
5:49
THEY FOUND INCLUDES EVIDENCE
5:54
THAT MAY BE SO INCRIMINATING TO
5:57
HIM THAT HE MIGHT WANT TO
5:59
ASSERT THE DEFENSE AT THE FBI
6:02
PLANTED THAT EVIDENCE IN HIS
6:04
HOME.
6:04
DONALD TRUMP MUST ALSO KNOW
6:07
THAT THE PAPERWORK THAT THE FBI
6:09
LEFT FOR HIM AT HIS HOME WOULD
6:13
NOT BE HELPFUL TO HIS PUBLIC
6:16
DEFENCE AND HIS PUBLIC
6:19
FUNDRAISING IF HE MADE THAT
6:21
DOCUMENT PUBLIC AS HE COULD.
6:24
AND THERE IS NO DEAFENING
6:27
DEMAND FROM REPUBLICANS THAT
6:29
DONALD TRUMP REVEAL EVERYTHING
6:32
THAT HE KNOWS ABOUT THE SEARCH
6:35
IN HIS HOME BY THE FBI.
6:37
TONIGHT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
6:39
IS REPORTING THAT AN INFORMANT
6:42
HELPED GUIDE THE FBI'S SEARCH
6:45
OF DONALD TRUMP'S HOME.
6:46
WALL STROLL WALL STREET JOURNAL
6:49
REPORTS QUOTE, SOMEONE FAMILIAR
6:50
WITH THE STORED PAPERS TOLD
6:52
INVESTIGATORS THERE MAY STILL
6:53
BE MORE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS AT
6:56
THE PRIVATE CLUB AFTER THE
6:58
NATIONAL ARCHIVES RETRIEVED 15
7:01
BOXES EARLIER IN THE YEAR,
7:03
PEOPLE FAMILIAR WITH THE MATTER
7:05
SAID.
7:05
AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
7:07
OFFICIALS HAD DOUBTS THAT THE
7:09
TRUMP TEAM WAS BEING TRUTHFUL
7:11
REGARDING WHAT MATERIAL
7:12
REMAINED AT THE PROPERTY, ONE
7:15
PERSON SAID.
7:15
TWO MONTHS AGO, IN JUST TWO
7:18
MONTHS AGO ON JUNE 3RD JAY BRAT,
7:22
NATIONALLY SECURITY'S PERSON AT
7:25
THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT HAD A
7:27
MEETING WITH TRUMP AND TRUMP'S
7:31
LAWYERS AT MAR-A-LAGO TO
7:32
DISCUSS RECORDS IT APPEARED TO
7:34
BE IN A BASEMENT STORAGE ROOM.
7:35
A FEW DAYS LATER, JAY BRAT SENT
7:39
A LETTER TO THE TRUMP LAWYERS
7:41
SAYING THAT A STRONGER LOCK
7:43
SHOULD BE INSTALLED ON THAT
7:45
STORAGE ROOM DOOR WE DON'T KNOW
7:47
WHAT'S HAPPENED BETWEEN THEN
7:49
AND NOW BUT THE NEXT THING THAT
7:53
WE PUBLICLY KNOW IS THAT THE
7:56
FBI SERVED A SEARCH WARRANT FOR
7:59
THOSE DOCUMENTS ON MONDAY.
8:00
THIS IS HOW DONALD TRUMP
8:03
DESCRIBED TODAY WHAT HAPPENED
8:05
ON MONDAY.
8:06
THE FBI AND OTHERS FROM THE
8:10
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WOULD NOT
8:11
LET ANYONE INCLUDING MY LAWYERS
8:17
THE ANYWHERE NEAR THE

[admin]

Trump Lawyer Says He Watched Search On Camera, Muddling Claim That FBI Planted Evidence: The Trump family was “actually able to see the whole thing,” attorney Christina Bobb said of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
by Mary Papenfuss
Huffington Post
Aug 12, 2022, 08:45 PM EDT

Donald Trump’s attorney has revealed that he and Trump family members watched nearly the entire FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on surveillance cameras, further dashing the former president’s claims that agents likely “planted” any evidence that was taken.

“The folks in New York — President Trump and his family — probably had a better view than I did. Because they had the CCTV, they were able to watch,” the former president’s attorney Christina Bobb said in an interview on Real America’s Voice on Thursday.

The Trump family was “actually able to see the whole thing,” she said. “They actually have a better idea of what took place inside.”

Trump was in Manhattan on Monday when FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago. Bobb was on the scene at the resort in Florida but said she spent much of the time in a Mar-a-Lago parking lot to “collect paper and answer questions” from investigators.

Eric Trump told The Daily Mail in an article Wednesday that he watched the search via surveillance cameras.

FBI agents removed 20 boxes of documents, including 11 sets of classified information, from Mar-a-Lago on Monday, according to the warrant and property receipt used by the FBI to conduct the search of Trump’s Florida residence.

Some of the classified information was top secret and designated to remain only in a secure government facility. Sources told The Washington Post in a report Thursday that some of the classified documents were believed to be related to nuclear weapons, which was a key reason for the urgency of the search.

The warrant indicated that Trump is under investigation for a possible violation of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice, and removing and destroying official documents.

Bobb said agents at Mar-a-Lago initially asked the staff to turn off the surveillance cameras, reportedly citing agent safety. But the lawyers quickly ordered them switched back on.

“The cameras were only off for a very short period of time,” Bobb said.

Real America's Voice (RAV)
@RealAmVoice ·Follow
“The cameras were only off for a very short period of time.”
@christina_bobb, says that while staff initially complied w/ the FBI request to turn off the CCTV cameras in Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s lawyers stepped in and the cameras were turned back on.
@RealDrGina #PrimeTime
[x]
7:05 PM · Aug 11, 2022
Read the full conversation on Twitter

Trump has repeatedly claimed on Truth Social that the FBI likely “planted” damaging evidence at Mar-a-Lago. It’s an accusation that has been widely picked up by his followers, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

Trump has never mentioned on his social media platform that agents were in view of surveillance cameras throughout most of the search and were being watched by him and family members, according to his own attorney. He has insisted there were “no witnesses” to the search.

“Planting information anyone?” Trump sarcastically wrote in a recent Truth Social post.

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump - 2d
The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, "planting." Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out? Obama and Clinton were never "raided," despite big disputes!

Trump indicates again on Truth Social that the FBI "planted" evidence.

Bobb said of the FBI in an interview earlier this week that there was “no security” to prevent the FBI from planting evidence. But she quickly added: “I’m not saying that’s what they did.”

Bobb also noted: “I don’t necessarily think that they would even go to the extent of trying to plant information.”

Aaron Rupar
@atrupar ·Follow
Trump attorney Christina Bobb suggests that the FBI may have planted evidence in Mar-a-Lago
[x]
2:03 PM · Aug 9, 2022
Read the full conversation on Twitter

[admin]

Trump Admin-Saudi Nuclear Probe Resurfaces Ahead of Warrant Unseal
by Brendan Cole
Newsweek
8/12/22 AT 8:03 AM EDT

A probe into Donald Trump's interactions with Saudi Arabia has resurfaced following a report FBI agents who raided the former president's Florida residence were seeking documents related to nuclear weapons.

Citing anonymous experts in classified information, The Washington Post said the search showed concern among U.S. government officials about what kind of information could be located at the Mar-a-Lago Club and whether it could fall into the wrong hands.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said he approved the decision for the search warrant at the resort. The Justice Department has filed a motion to make the warrant public, which could happen on Friday afternoon.

While the Post said these sources provided no further details over whether the documents were recovered, what the information was and which countries it pertained to, the raid has focused minds on an investigation released in February 2019.

That House of Representatives report highlighted whistleblowers' concerns with the Trump Administration's "efforts to transfer sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia," and was tweeted on Thursday by Judd Legum, who runs the Popular Information newsletter.

"We don't know why Trump took classified nuclear docs," Legum said in a follow-up tweet. "But certain nuclear information would have very high economic value to Saudi Arabia and other governments."

Fordham University law professor Jed Shugerman tweeted: "Why would Trump want to keep nuclear documents?" "It is time to review the 2019 House Oversight Committee's stunning allegations of nuclear corruption," between the Trump administration and "Saudi/Qatar."

That committee report made a number of accusations against the Trump administration, including that it tried "to rush the transfer of highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia." This was without congressional review and in potential violation of the Atomic Energy Act that restricts the export of U.S. nuclear technology.

The report also raised questions about the relationship between the White House and Riyadh following the murder of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which was met with "equivocation by President Trump and other top Administration officials."

The report said that in the U.S. "strong private commercial interests have been pressing aggressively for the transfer of highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia," and this posed a "potential risk to U.S. national security absent adequate safeguards."

"These commercial entities stand to reap billions of dollars through contracts associated with constructing and operating nuclear facilities in Saudi Arabia," it added.

However, in July 2019, the Republican staff of the House Oversight Committee rejected Democrat claims that the Trump administration committed wrongdoing in its dealings with the Middle Eastern kingdom.

Their report said the firm IP3 International, comprised of former U.S. national security officials, pushing to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia, had kept Congress in the loop. Also, the Trump administration was "not rushing" nuclear technology to the kingdom, nor had it "skirted requirements for congressional notification."

"The evidence currently before the committee does not show impropriety in the proposed transfer of nuclear energy technology to Saudi Arabia," the Republicans said.

Meanwhile, Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, has called the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago "outrageous", telling Fox News that no such documents containing nuclear information were "disseminated freely" at the resort.

Christina Bobb, an attorney for the former president, told Fox News that while she had not "specifically spoken to the president about what nuclear materials may or may not have been in there. I do not believe there were any in there."

Newsweek has contacted the Trump team for comment.

***********************

Before Giving Billions to Jared Kushner, Saudi Investment Fund Had Big Doubts: Before committing $2 billion to Mr. Kushner’s fledgling firm, officials at a fund led by the Saudi crown prince questioned taking such a big risk.
by David D. Kirkpatrick
April 10, 2022

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal.

A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, previously undisclosed documents show.

Those objections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.

But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel.

Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.

Mr. Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia who had criticized the kingdom’s rulers.

The Saudi fund agreed to invest twice as much and on more generous terms with Mr. Kushner than it did at about the same time with former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — who was also starting a new fund — even though Mr. Mnuchin had a record as a successful investor before entering government, the documents show. The amount of the investment in his firm, Liberty Strategic Capital — $1 billion — has not been previously disclosed.

A spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s firm said of its relationship with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, “Affinity, like many other top investment firms, is proud to have PIF and other leading organizations that have careful screening criteria, as investors.”

A spokesman for the Saudi fund declined to comment on its investment process. If any additional discussions about the deal took place, they were not reflected in the documents and correspondence obtained by The New York Times.

The Times reported last fall that Mr. Kushner had been seeking a Saudi investment. Now, the internal fund records and correspondence obtained by The Times show the outcome, scale and timing of his firm’s deal as well as the debate it aroused. Those documents and other filings indicate that at this point Mr. Kushner’s venture depends primarily on the Saudi money.

Mr. Kushner planned to raise up to $7 billion in all, according to a document prepared last summer for the Saudi fund’s board. But so far he appears to have signed up few other major investors.

In its most recent public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated March 31, Mr. Kushner’s firm reported that its main fund had $2.5 billion under management, almost entirely from investors based overseas. Most of that appears to be the $2 billion from Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi documents obtained by The Times say that in return for its investment, the Saudi fund would receive a stake of at least 28 percent in Mr. Kushner’s main investment vehicle.

No law or rules constrain the investment activities of former administration officials after leaving the White House; many from both parties have profited from connections and experiences gained in government.

But Robert Weissman, president of the nonprofit group Public Citizen, called Mr. Kushner’s relationship with the Saudis “extremely troubling,” arguing that his stance toward the kingdom’s leadership as a senior adviser “makes the business partnership appear even more to be both a reward to, and an investment in, Kushner.”

Saudi officials say that the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, which also holds stakes in the ride-sharing company Uber and the Newcastle United Football Club in Britain, operates autonomously, with an elaborate governance structure that includes the investment panel. But Prince Mohammed took control of the fund when he rose to power in 2015 and he is its paramount decision maker.

Mr. Kushner, whose fund has not publicly disclosed a theme or focus, has little experience or track record in private equity. Before working in the White House, he ran his family’s commercial real estate empire, sometimes with disappointing results. His best-known deal was the $1.8 billion purchase of the office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, in 2007; the building’s mortgage became a crippling liability when the recession hit the next year.

Diplomats, investors and ethics experts noted during the Trump administration that his anticipated return to the family business injected a potential conflict of interest into Mr. Kushner’s relationship with Prince Mohammed and other oil-wealthy Arab royals. Many are major long-term investors in American real estate, and the Kushner family had courted them before.

While advising Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner developed a friendship and informal alliance with the Saudi crown prince. Prince Mohammed signaled that he favored closer relations between Israel and the Arab monarchs of the Persian Gulf, which was also one of Mr. Kushner’s priorities while in the Trump administration. He helped negotiate a series of agreements, called the Abraham Accords, opening diplomatic relations between Israel and other Arab monarchies. After leaving government, he set up a nonprofit to promote economic and other ties between the countries.

In Washington, Mr. Kushner had also helped broker $110 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia over 10 years. He helped protect those and other weapons deals from congressional outrage over the murder of Mr. Khashoggi and the humanitarian catastrophe created by the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen.

The debate within the Saudi fund over investing with Mr. Kushner was a stark contrast to the easy approval of the proposal by Mr. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner who invested in numerous Hollywood films, including “The Lego Movie,” and helped resurrect a failing California bank before entering government.

Mr. Mnuchin’s fund is focused on cybersecurity, financial technology and entertainment — all sectors that fit Saudi priorities, according to an executive summary prepared by the fund’s staff. The summary noted that Mr. Mnuchin’s work at the Treasury gave him “significant access toward understanding the future of the U.S. financial system,” and the firm’s founders had “deep experience at some of the highest levels of the U.S. regulatory system” overseeing and monitoring its industries.

As Treasury secretary, Mr. Mnuchin had also chaired a committee responsible for vetting certain merger deals with foreign companies; the summary said he had “shaped” the new fund to accommodate investment from foreign governments like the kingdom.

In its most recent filing, dated March 31, Mr. Mnuchin’s firm reported raising $2.7 billion from a total of 33 investors. Most of the money came from abroad, and the Saudi documents say that other Persian Gulf states also invested.

A spokesman for Liberty Strategic Capital said the firm “has a diverse investor base including U.S. insurance companies, family offices, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors.”

Both Mr. Kushner’s and Mr. Mnuchin’s funds treated the Saudi fund as a “cornerstone” investor, the Public Investment Fund documents say, offering the Saudis a discount on the standard 2 percent asset management fee for private equity firms as well as a cut of the firm’s 20 percent share of any fund profits, known as carried interest.

But the Saudis agreed to pay Mr. Mnuchin’s firm only a 1 percent asset management fee, compared to 1.25 percent for Mr. Kushner’s, the documents indicate. On a $2 billion investment, that would pay his firm $25 million a year, not including a share of any profits earned by the Affinity fund.

Both firms agreed to open regional offices in Riyadh, which the Saudi government says it will soon require of any international company doing business with the kingdom.

The five-member board investment committee evaluating Mr. Kushner’s proposal referred to it with the code name Project Astro. The panel was led by Yasir al-Rumayyan, a Harvard Business School graduate who is also chairman of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant. The panel also included Andrew Liveris, the Australian-born former chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company, and Ayman al-Sayari, the vice chairman of the Saudi Central Bank.

A panel member identified in the minutes as Dr. al-Mojel — possibly Ibrahim al-Mojel, the chairman of the Saudi Industrial Development Fund, who holds a Ph.D. from Stanford — asked before the June 30, 2021, meeting about the justification for investing in Mr. Kushner’s fund. “Why is the strategic benefit worth the risk?” he asked, according to printed responses.

The responses, apparently prepared by staff of the Saudi fund, argued that the promised Riyadh office of Mr. Kushner’s firm, Affinity, would help the Saudis “capitalize on the capabilities of Affinity’s founders’ deep understanding of different government policies and geopolitical systems.”

Why aren’t there any significant institutional investors from the US?

The Affinity principal would like to avoid media attention at this time. Accordingly, Affinity has approached international institutional investors on a very discreet basis (especially PIF as Affinity’s cornerstone LP) to anchor the launch of their inaugural fund.

Saudi staff wrote that Mr. Kushner was trying to avoid attention by initially courting only international institutions like the Saudi Public Investment Fund for his new venture.

Source: Minutes of the Board Investment Committee of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, June 30, 2021

The explanation for the absence of any American institutional investors in Mr. Kushner’s fund was that he “would like to avoid media attention,” the written responses said. “Accordingly, Affinity has approached international investors on a very discreet basis.”

Mr. Kushner’s lack of private equity experience and the “unsatisfactory” results of due diligence reviews conducted on behalf of the Saudi fund “are valid and important concerns,” the responses acknowledged, but they attributed the findings to the fact that he was still setting up the infrastructure for his company.

What’s more, the responses added, the Saudi fund had “partially mitigated these risks”: The Saudis had stipulated that Mr. Kushner’s firm could draw down only $500 million of the $2 billion commitment before “having a qualified investment team in place, on-boarding core operational professionals and constructing the investment committee.”

The expertise of the [general partner] isn’t relevant to the objective of the fund. Even the case studies presented focused on real estate only. Also, the operational [due diligence] shows that they are unsatisfactory in all aspects.

These are valid and important concerns. These risks have been flagged and detailed in the investment memo, including the risk of the Principal having limited experience in private equity and the inability for Affinity to provide any quantifiable investment track-record for their founding team.

Responding to objections raised about the $2 billion investment in Mr. Kushner’s fund, staff of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund acknowledged that he lacked a track record in private equity.

Source: Minutes of the Board Investment Committee of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, June 30, 2021

(Late last year, Mr. Kushner hired two experienced private equity investors, Bret Pearlman and Asad Naqvi; the recent securities filing states that Affinity Partners now has a staff of 20, about half of whom are investment professionals.)

Even after reading the responses, Mr. Liveris, the former Dow Chemical chief executive, and Mr. al-Sayari, of the Saudi Central bank, added their own doubts along with Dr. al-Mojel’s. Mr. al-Rumayyan, the panel chairman and top executive of the Saudi fund, appeared to concur, according to the minutes. The panel members did not respond to requests for comment or could not be reached.

The minutes record that all four panel members attending the meeting “stated that they are not in favor of Project Astro.” The panel’s rules require the votes of a majority of those present to pass a resolution, the minutes note. Mr. al-Rumayyan, in this case, suggested raising the panel’s “views and decision” to the fund’s board, led by the crown prince.

But within days, the board had passed a resolution approving the deal, documents show.

In a letter dated last July 5, fund staff explained to a board member who had questioned the size of the investment why it could not be cut back.

“This investment aims to form a strategic relationship with the Affinity Partners Fund and its founder, Jared Kushner,” the letter said. A reduction of the size of its $2 billion stake “may negatively or fundamentally affect the framework of the agreed strategic and commercial relationship.”

David D. Kirkpatrick is an investigative reporter based in New York and the author of “Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East.“ In 2020 he shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on covert Russian interference in other governments and as the Cairo bureau chief from 2011 to 2015 he led coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings. @ddknyt • Facebook

Kate Kelly covers money, influence, and policy as a correspondent in the Washington bureau of the Times. Before that, she spent twenty years covering Wall Street deals, key players and their intersection with politics. She is the author of three books, including "The Education of Brett Kavanaugh." @katekelly

A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Kushner Firm Got $2 Billion From Saudis.

******************************

France’s Macron talks energy with Saudi Crown Prince MBS in Paris: MBS’s visit to France has been controversial, with President Macron criticised by some in his country.
aljazeera.com
Published On 29 Jul 2022

[x]
French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shake hands at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Thursday [Benoit Tessier/Reuters]

Energy was the main topic on the agenda between French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, during talks in Paris seen as a diplomatic rehabilitation of the de facto leader of the Saudi kingdom.

Aides to the French president had indicated ahead of the talks on Thursday that Macron would urge Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production to help bring down crude prices, reiterating a request made by United States President Joe Biden during a visit to Riyadh earlier this month.

A statement by the presidential office on Friday made no explicit reference to oil or gas, but said Macron had “underlined the importance of continuing the ongoing coordination with Saudi Arabia with regards to the diversification of energy supplies for European countries”.

With Russian oil and gas supplies either unavailable to European Union nations due to sanctions or being withheld by Moscow, European countries are desperately seeking alternative sources of fossil fuels.

Saudi Arabia is one of few countries worldwide with the capacity to increase its output.

The French statement said that Macron and MBS also discussed food security amid fears of famines caused by the loss of Ukrainian grain, and agreed to work “to ease the effects” of the war in Ukraine.

“The President and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia underlined the need to bring an end to this conflict and intensify their cooperation to ease the effects in Europe, the Middle East and the wider world,” Macron’s office said.

The two leaders also discussed the war in Yemen. The French president commended what he said were efforts by Saudi Arabia to “find a political, global and inclusive solution under the aegis of the United Nations and expressed his hope that the truce continues”, the statement said.

[x]
French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ahead of a working dinner at the Elysee Palace in Paris [Benoit Tessier/Reuters]

‘Warm welcome’

MBS on Friday thanked French President Emmanuel Macron for the “warm reception”.

“As I leave your friendly country, it gives me great pleasure to express to your Excellency my deepest gratitude and appreciation for the warm reception and hospitality accorded to me and the accompanying delegation,” bin Salman wrote in a message posted by the Saudi foreign ministry.

The de facto leader of the oil-rich nation is being courted again after being shunned by Western leaders following the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents inside Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

Macron and Biden both attracted criticism from rights groups for their rapprochement with the kingdom.

Biden fist-bumped MBS in a gesture that was seized on by critics, while Macron shook hands on the steps of the Elysee Palace as he welcomed the prince.

“He’s shaking the hand for a long time of man whose hands are covered in blood,” senior left-wing French MP Alexis Corbiere told BFM television on Friday.

The killing of Khashoggi was described by a United Nations probe as an “extrajudicial killing for which Saudi Arabia is responsible”. US intelligence agencies determined that MBS had “approved” the operation that led to Khashoggi’s death.

Hatice Cengiz, who was about to wed the journalist when he was killed, said on Thursday that she was “scandalised and outraged that Emmanuel Macron is receiving with all the honours the executioner of my fiancé”.

Allies of the French president defended the meeting as a demonstration of “realpolitik” – putting practical needs above principles in foreign policy.

Public services minister Stanislas Guerini, a close ally of the president, told Europe 1 radio on Friday that the role of the president was “to protect the French people” and that he believed that service had been carried out.

****************************

Golfers eager to play for Saudi-funded LIV Golf despite human rights concerns: US golf media has been critical of LIV Golf, which is backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. But for many golfers — especially lesser-known ones — the league offers unparalleled financial opportunities.
by Adam Lucente
al-monitor.com
June 27, 2022

A new Saudi-funded men’s golf league is attracting top golfers, despite criticism because of Saudi Arabia’s human rights issues.

LIV Golf is coming to the US city of Portland this weekend, and just won over another top golfer — Brooks Koepka. Playing on the new circuit, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, is especially attractive to lesser-known golfers who struggle to make a living playing the sport.

“People may not realize how expensive it is to be an aspiring golfer,” Brandon Cubitt, who heads New Nine Golf, told Al-Monitor. “LIV is appealing because it’s so much more money.”

LIV Golf was founded last year, and held its first tournament outside of London earlier this month. It is funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which is investing in an array of sectors to help the kingdom diversify and reduce dependence on oil. LIV Golf is headed by the Australian golf legend Greg Norman. The retired golfer has long been a critic of the PGA Tour, which is the dominant men’s golf competition in North America. LIV Golf only has male players at present, though Norman has expressed an interest in adding female golfers as well.

LIV Golf has been controversial from the start due to its Saudi funding source. The Gulf state has an array of human rights issues, including a high execution rate, legal discrimination against women and the infamous murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Saudi Arabia has made limited progress on some of these issues in recent years, granting women the right to drive in 2018 and easing male guardianship laws last year, for example.

Many top golfers have left the PGA for LIV due to the potential to make millions. Americans Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau have reportedly been offered more than $100 million each to join.

But LIV Golf is perhaps most appealing to less famous and less compensated golfers. Many LIV Golf players are not household names, such as Spain's David Puig, who most recently golfed for Arizona State University.

Cubitt is a scratch golfer in Alberta, Canada, who creates golf content on YouTube, Instagram and other channels. He pointed out that aspiring professional golfers who want to play on the PGA Tour must first compete in “Q School” competitions, which cost thousands of dollars just to enter.

“If guys are not making money, they have no way of paying these fees,” said Cubitt. “Some of these guys don’t necessarily come from money. They’re eating fast food five times a week.”

LIV Golf’s first event had a minimum payout of $120,000, which is more than five times higher than that of some PGA events.

Golfers who want to play in LIV face considerable criticism. Earlier this month, a Sept. 11 victims group slammed Mickelson for working with Saudi Arabia due to the Saudi government’s alleged role in the attacks. Northern Irish golf superstar Rory McIlroy recently called LIV Golf participants “duplicitous.” US golf media has been especially critical of the league. One Golf Channel analyst accused LIV Golf participants of “exchanging a little bit of their soul for money.”

There is a disconnect between the criticism of LIV Golf in US media and some of the players, according to one sports journalist.

“It’s easy for people not offered that money to say they’re not gonna take that money,” Chase Howell, who writes for The Action Network, told Al-Monitor.

Howell is also a caddy on the Korn Ferry Tour, which is a developmental golf tour whose players aspire to make it to the PGA. He referred to LIV’s minimum payout as “life-changing money” for such golfers, and said many golfers on his tour would seriously consider playing for LIV.

“Talk to tour players and people making careers out of golf — they’re a lot more supportive,” said Howell. “Golf media has been very anti-this league. I don’t think that's what the majority of the public thinks.”

At least one Korn Ferry Tour alum, Turk Petit, is now playing for LIV Golf, and others may soon join. Howell also pointed to the case of English golfer Sam Horsfield, who has made $397,157 in career earnings, including at international PGA events, according to Golf Channel. The minimum payout for LIV Golf’s first event, which Horsfield competed in, is equivalent to more than 25% of that.

LIV is also beating the PGA in terms of compensation for caddies.

“Caddies are treated very well on LIV. All travel and hotels are paid for. They’re going above and beyond for every caddy,” said Howell. “The PGA has never paid for travel.”

Some LIV caddies expressed similar views to Golf Digest this month.

LIV Golf has several more events scheduled this year, including two at Trump Golf courses and one in Saudi Arabia itself in October. The PGA has already responded to LIV Golf’s emergence, refusing to allow its players to compete in the rival league and also promising more guaranteed money to those who stay.

Some observers think the outrage over LIV Golf may dissipate. David Samson hosts the Nothing Personal podcast on CBS Sports and previously served as president of the professional baseball teams the Miami Marlins and the Montreal Expos. He said that LIV golfers can survive the outrage over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

“Golfers have taken advantage of the fact that, with the public, there’s generally initial rage that then disappears,” Samson told Al-Monitor. “There’s a huge amount of guaranteed money waiting on the other side of that.”

Samson added that LIV has improved its public relations, which he described as “terrible in the beginning.”

Earlier this year, Mickelson actually described Saudis as “scary” when asked about his connection to LIV Golf. The comments drew a tremendous backlash.

Now, Norman is going on the offensive. Last month, he acknowledged Saudi Arabia’s human rights issues and praised the “cultural change” in the country. This month, he pointed out that the PGA Tour’s own sponsors do tens of billions of dollars worth of business in Saudi Arabia, which the golfer called “hypocrisy.”

“LIV did a good job with PR saying ‘we all have hypocrisy,’” said Samson.

Whether LIV Golf can compete with the PGA in the years to come remains to be seen. Many other rival sport leagues in North America have failed, such as the XFL American football league. Samson said LIV’s success “depends on the level of investment” from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

Some in the golf world also feel that LIV may not be as exciting to watch as the “major” golf championships, such as the US Open and PGA Championship. For example, wins on the LIV Golf circuit do not count toward world golf rankings. Howell described LIV as more of an “exhibition.”

“They’re not playing to win as much. There’s not a bad side to losing. Part of the reason we love golf is the nerves we get,” he said. “People like the blowups, to see if people make mistakes. That’s why the majors are enticing.”

Many of golf's biggest names remain loyal to the PGA Tour. American Tiger Woods, who is chasing the record for most major titles of all time, turned down close to $1 billion to join LIV Golf, Norman told The Washington Post in May.

Cubitt said that golfers will need to choose between career achievements and the Public Investment Fund’s fortune when deciding whether to join LIV Golf.

“Guys really have to weigh what winning notable championships means,” he said. “It’s lifestyle and guaranteed money versus legacy.”