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   From: nowomr@protonmail.com   
      
   John Kelly Goes On The Record To Confirm Several Disturbing Stories About   
   Traitor Defendant Trump   
      
      
   CNN  —   
      
   John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff for Donald Trump,   
   offered his harshest criticism yet of the former president in an exclusive   
   statement to CNN.   
      
   Kelly set the record straight with on-the-record confirmation of a number of   
   damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors attacking US   
   service members and veterans, listing a number of objectionable comments   
   Kelly witnessed Trump make firsthand.   
      
   “What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he   
   wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by   
   other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their   
   country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend   
   years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in   
   it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of   
   military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who   
   demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star   
   families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious   
   heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t   
   visit their graves in France.   
      
   “A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of   
   unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on   
   working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what   
   America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who   
   cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40   
   years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation   
   that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous   
   dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic   
   institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.   
      
   “There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”   
      
   In the statement, Kelly is confirming, on the record, a number of details in   
   a 2020 story in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, including   
   Trump turning to Kelly on Memorial Day 2017, as they stood among those killed   
   in Afghanistan and Iraq in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, and   
   saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”   
      
   Those details also include Trump’s inability to understand why the American   
   public respects former prisoners of war and those shot down in combat. Then-   
   candidate Trump of course said in front of a crowd in 2015 that former   
   Vietnam POW Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was “not a war hero. He   
   was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”   
   But behind closed doors, sources told Goldberg, this lack of understanding   
   went on to cause Trump to repeatedly call McCain a “loser” and to refer to   
   former President George H. W. Bush, who was also shot down as a Navy pilot in   
   World War II, as a “loser.”   
      
   CNN reached out to the Trump campaign Monday afternoon, telling officials   
   there that a former administration official had confirmed, on the record, a   
   number of details about the 2020 Atlantic story, without naming Kelly, and   
   seeking comment. The Trump campaign responded by insulting the character and   
   credibility of retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley,   
   who had nothing to do with this story.   
      
   The Atlantic article also described Trump’s 2018 visit to France for the   
   centennial anniversary of the end of World War I, where, according to several   
   senior staff members, Trump said he did not want to visit the graves of   
   American soldiers buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris   
   because, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” During   
   that same trip to France, the article reported, Trump said the 1,800 US   
   Marines killed in the Belleau Wood were “suckers” for getting killed.   
      
   And Kelly’s statement adds context to a story in the book “The Divider: Trump   
   in the White House, 2017-2021,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, in which   
   Trump, after a separate trip to France in 2017, tells Kelly he wants no   
   wounded veterans in a military parade he’s trying to have planned in his   
   honor. Inspired by the Bastille Day parade, except for the section of the   
   parade featuring wounded French veterans in wheelchairs, Trump tells Kelly,   
   “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade.”   
      
   “Those are the heroes,” Kelly said. “In our society, there’s only one group   
   of people who are more heroic than they are – and they are buried over in   
   Arlington.”   
      
   “I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”   
      
   The story squares with another recent story from Goldberg in The Atlantic, a   
   profile of retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley,   
   in which Trump does not react well to seeing severely wounded Army Captain   
   Luis Avila singing “God Bless America” at a welcome event for the new   
   chairman. “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that,   
   the wounded.”   
      
   Kelly’s statement also refers to a remark Trump made in response to that same   
   article, which describes Milley, in the closing days of the Trump presidency   
   in 2020, receiving intelligence that the Chinese military feared Trump was   
   about to order a military strike on it. Milley, in a call authorized by Trump   
   administration officials, reassured his Chinese counterparts that such a   
   strike was not going to happen.   
      
   That call was first reported in 2021 in the book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and   
   Robert Costa, but Trump said this past week on his social media site that the   
   call was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would   
   have been DEATH.”   
      
   Asked for reaction to the suggestion that he deserves execution, Milley told   
   Norah O’Donnell of “60 Minutes” that he wouldn’t “comment directly on those,   
   those things. But I can tell you that this military, this soldier, me, will   
   never turn our back on that Constitution.”   
      
   Kelly’s statement to CNN comes days after former Trump White House aide   
   Cassidy Hutchinson sat down with CNN in an interview promoting her new book,   
   “Enough,” and warned the public that “Donald Trump is the most grave threat   
   we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American   
   history.”   
      
   “Enough,” interestingly, contains a scene in which Hutchinson and then-White   
   House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin push back against   
   Goldberg’s 2020 story. Griffin issued a statement to The Atlantic after that   
   story posted denying the report.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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