Revealed: Trump exposed military secrets out of rage



The ongoing mystery behind former President Donald Trump's stash of highly classified military secrets at Mar-a-Lago has been why he insisted on exposing confidential information. He has repeatedly claimed the documents are "his" and he has a right to possess them — but has never explained exactly what he wanted with them.

The shocking tape obtained by CNN that shows him boasting to patrons of his Bedminster golf club about possessing an Iranian battle plan offers the answer, argued Susan Glasser for The New Yorker: he wanted to discredit Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, after months of behind-the-scenes drama that left the former president enraged at Milley's refusal to enable his worst impulses.

"The damning evidence against Trump would not exist if not for his rift with Mark Milley, a remarkable feud between the Commander-in-Chief and the nation’s top general that had been a secret backdrop to the public drama that played out after the 2020 election," wrote Glasser. "At the time the tape was made, in the summer of 2021, Trump was apoplectic that Milley’s fears about him were becoming public. Two recently published books — one by the journalists Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker of the Post, and the other by Michael Bender, then of the Wall Street Journal — had reported new details about Milley’s efforts, including regular 'land the plane' phone calls with Meadows, the White House chief of staff, to prevent Trump from drawing the military into his quest to overturn the 2020 election."

According to the report, "Milley was even quoted fretting about Trump and his supporters staging a 'Reichstag moment' — a fear that seemed eerily prescient on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to block congressional certification of Trump’s defeat. Trump, in turn, publicly denounced Milley and said that he had only picked him as chairman in 2018 to spite James Mattis, his soon-to-quit Defense Secretary at the time."

All of this is laid bare in Trump's own words on the tape, explicitly trying to claim the document proves Milley was the one who planned to invade Iran rather than him, as Milley had also feared he might do in his final weeks in office. Sources closer to Milley have pushed back, claiming Milley was in fact trying to restrain the former president from such an attack.

For his part, Trump has denied the thing he was holding on the tape was a classified document, claiming he was simply in possession of other innocent documents like golf course "building plans."



from Alternet.org https://ift.tt/PpL1qU5
via sinceretalk

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How misinformation could shape the Israel-Hamas war

Image
I wanted to interview Nicholas Grossman regarding the role of misinformation in the war between Israel and Hamas. In particular, I hoped to ask the professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, and senior editor of Arc Digital , about misinformation that arose from American reporting on an explosion at a hospital in Gaza. You know what? I ended up repeating a bit of misinformation! I asked him to lay out the facts about a blast that “killed hundreds, including kids,” and he said nuh-uh (not his words). In fact, Professor Grossman said, “there never were hundreds killed by an explosion at that hospital. Media reported that the hospital was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike killing 500, but that was based on something a Hamas-controlled agency said and was never supported by evidence.” Professor Grossman went on to say “what apparently did happen is something hit a nearby parking lot and caused a smaller explosion, most likely a rocket fired from Gaza towards I
Read more

PA GOP Senate candidate who says he 'started with nothing' actually grew up in a mansion

Image
David McCormick, who is Pennsylvania's presumptive Republican U.S. Senate nominee, has often suggested he grew up poor in a rural community. But a new report finds that his upbringing was far more affluent than he's suggested. The New York Times reported Friday that McCormick — a former hedge fund executive who lived in Connecticut as recently as 2022 — has been cagey with voters about his childhood. McCormick has tweeted that he was "raised in Bloomsburg working on his family's farm," said on a 2022 podcast that he " started with nothing " and told CBS News that same year that he " didn't have anything " growing up as the son of two schoolteachers. But according to the Times , McCormick's father, Dr. James H. McCormick , was appointed president of what is now Bloomsburg University by Gov. Milton Schapp (D) in 1973. He moved his family into Buckalew Place — the official mansion for presidents of the school that currently spans 5
Read more

'It is his aphrodisiac': Ex-RNC chair explains how gag order 'stimulates' Trump and his base

Image
As President Donald Trump faces gag orders in two separate cases — one from Judge Arthur Engoron presiding over his New York civil fraud trial, and the other from Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will preside of his Washington, DC January 6 trial in March — some experts expect him to violate the orders soon. With a history of threatening and verbally attacking others, MSNBC's Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday pointed to the fact the ex-president's rhetoric influenced January 6 rioters who chanted, "Hang Mike Pence!" Noting Trump "gets deeply stimulated and excited by the violence," Wallace asked analyst and ex-Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele what he thinks the MAGA hopeful's "calculation is on whether violating these gag orders lands him in jail is a good thing or bad thing for him." POLL : Should Trump be allowed to hold office again? Steele replied, "You put your finger on two very important words t
Read more