John Kelly stands in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. on November 16, 2018.
SAUL LOEB/Getty Images
Former White House chief of staff John Kelly is still pushing the idea that he was the adult in the room when he worked for President Donald Trump. In an interview at the Sea Island Summit political conference hosted by the Washington Examiner, Kelly said that he warned Trump before leaving the White House that he would get impeached if his successor wasn’t someone willing to tell him the hard truth. “I said, whatever you do—and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place—I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth—don’t do that,” Kelly said. “Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”
With his words, Kelly, a retired, four-star Marine general, appeared to be strongly suggesting that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was squarely to blame for the current impeachment probe. Kelly says that seeing how things worked out when he left the White House almost a year ago he has “an awful lot of, to say the least, second thoughts about leaving.” Kelly seems to believe that “if I was still there or someone like me was there” the situation would be much different.
At the same conference, Kelly also criticized Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria, calling it a “catastrophically bad idea.” Kelly claimed he had advised Trump against pulling the troops out of the country, insisting that the alliance with the Kurdish fighters was key for U.S. interests in the region. “I want to get out of the endless wars, too.
The problem is, the other side, even if we wanted to surrender, will not take our surrender. They hate us because of who we are, the way we live our lives, the way we worship our God,” Kelly said. “What was working in Syria was that for very little investment, the Kurds were doing all the fighting, the vast majority of the dying, and we were providing intelligence and fire support assistance. And we were winning.”
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