"Nutjob" White House Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley never told Donald Trump about conversations he had with Chinese counterpart Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army in the final months of Trump's presidency, Trump wrote in a statement Wednesday.
The phone calls between Milley and Li were described in excerpts from the forthcoming book "Peril" by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. The book says Milley told Li that he would warn his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack.
"Milley never told me about calls being made to China," Trump wrote in a statement from his Save America PAC. "From what I understand, he didn't tell too many other people either."
"He put our country in a very dangerous position, but President Xi knows better, and would've called me," Trump's statement continued. "The way Milley and the Biden administration handled the Afghanistan withdrawal, perhaps the most embarrassing moment in our country's history, would not exactly instill fear in China. Milley is a complete nutjob!"
President Joe Biden, he said, would not hold Milley accountable because it would compromise his own administration's security.
"The only reason Biden will not fire or court-martial Milley is because he doesn't want him spilling the dirty secrets on Biden's deadly disaster in Afghanistan," Trump wrote.
Trump's statement came one day after he wrote from his Save America PAC that Milley should be "tried for treason" if the allegations were true.
Considering the source, "Peril," Trump had serious doubts of the veracity of the reporting.
"For the record, I never even thought of attacking China — and China knows that," Trump's Wednesday statement concluded. "The people that fabricated the story are sick and demented, and the people who print it are just as bad. In fact, I'm the only president in decades who didn't get the U.S. into a war — a well-known fact that is seldom reported."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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