General Milley Accused of Treason

Former President Donald Trump has dismissed claims made by the US’s top military commander Mike Milley as “fake news” after the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff alleged in a new book that he had taken steps to limit Trump’s powers to launch nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the election. 

The book, described as an inside look at “one of the most dangerous periods in American history” and authored by the veteran journalist Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, outlines a series of allegations made against the former President which ultimately inspired Milley’s concerns that Trump was close to “going rogue” in the aftermath of the election after falling into a “serious mental decline.” 

In an action allegedly ordered by the US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Milley revealed that he had called a meeting of senior Pentagon staff in the national military command centre’s War Room on January 8th to instruct them to disobey orders from the former President as a matter of “procedure.” Agreeing with Pelosi’s proposition, “if they couldn’t even stop [Trump] from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what he may do?”, Milley allegedly told staff: 

“You never know what a president’s trigger point is. No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. I am part of that procedure.”

According to extracts from Woodward’s inside look into the final days of the Trump presidency obtained by CNN, Milley also interacted with national security officials who feared that the President would try to “wag the dog” and provoke a war to distract from the election defeat to Joe Biden. He told Gina Haspel, the then-director of the CIA, to “aggressively watch everything” over fears of what she called a “right-wing coup” which could have materialised in an attack on Iran. 

As revealed in Peril, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was even was inspired to establish a covert channel to his counterpart in China to calm nuclear tensions in the wake of the January 6th Capitol riot after Trump became “all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.” Promising Li Zuocheng, the chief of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Liberation Army of China that he would alert him in the event of a US attack prior to the election, the book notes a second call to China after January 6th, in which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reiterated that the US government was “100 per cent steady, [though] democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”

“Milley was overseeing the mobilisation of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world,” the authors wrote in Peril. “Some might contend that Milley had overstepped his authority. However, he believed that his actions were a good faith precaution to ensure there was no historic rupture in the international order, no accidental war with China or others, and no use of nuclear weapons.”

In a statement released in rebuttal to the claims outlined by Woodward’s tell-all, Trump branded Milley as a “dumbass” before lambasting him for being “the same failed leader who engineered the worst withdrawal from a country, Afghanistan, in US history.” Citing his promises to China, the former President proceeded to call for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be “tried for treason if the story is true” before stating: “for the record, I never even thought of attacking China, and China knows that.”

“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 US into a war - a well-known fact that is seldom reported … The good news is that the story is Fake News concocted by a weak and ineffective General together with two authors who I refused to give an interview to because they write fiction, not fact. Actions should be taken immediately against Milley, and better generals in our Military, of which we have many, should get involved so that another Afghanistan disaster never happens again. Remember, I was the one who took out 100% of the ISIS Caliphate! Milley said it couldn’t be done.”