Trump's rage at Gen. Milley over Iran policy may have led to potentially incriminating recording

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Trump's rage at Gen. Milley over Iran policy may have led to potentially incriminating recording ​

by Charles Jay for Community Contributors Team
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Thursday, June 29, 2023 at 9:25:49a PDT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...kdpre&pm_source=DKRE&pm_medium=email#comments

President Donald Trump departs the White House to visit outside St. John's Church, in Washington, D.C. Walking behind Trump from left are, Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Donald Trump’s anger toward Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, may have been a key factor leading to the potentially incriminating audio recording in which the former president acknowledged that he had retained “secret” military information that he had not declassified.
The audio reveals that the top secret document discussed at the July 2021 meeting at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, referred to a plan for attacking Iran. This is what Trump said on the tape first obtained by CNN:

“Well, with Milley – uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump says, according to the transcript. “They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”

CNN said the meeting occurred shortly after The New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser on July 15, 2021, about Milley’s fight to stop Trump from striking Iran. There was particular concern that Trump might attack Iran following his defeat in the November 2020 election as he desperately tried to cling to power.
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Glasser, who co-authored the book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” with her husband New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker, wrote:

“It was not public at the time, but Milley believed that the nation had come close—“very close”—to conflict with the Islamic Republic. This dangerous post-election period, Milley said, was all because of Trump’s “Hitler”-like embrace of the “Big Lie” that the election had been stolen from him; Milley feared it was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.”

Glasser also wrote:

A running concern for Milley was the prospect of Trump pushing the nation into a military conflict with Iran. He saw this as a real threat, in part because of a meeting with the President in the early months of 2020, at which one of Trump’s advisers raised the prospect of taking military action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons if Trump were to lose the election. At another meeting, at which Trump was not present, some of the President’s foreign-policy advisers again pushed military action against Iran. Milley later said that, when he asked why they were so intent on attacking Iran, Vice-President Mike Pence replied, “Because they are evil.”

CBS News correspondent Robert Costa, who co-authored the book “Peril” with Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, wrote that Trump became extremely jealous of Milley as a result of the stories by Glasser and others.

Trump loathed the positive coverage Milley received in the press and in books. In his post-presidency period, Trump fumed about Milley, who seemed to be portrayed as a hero, while he was cast as an insurrectionist.
The former president began to talk regularly about Milley in 2021, dismissing him and bringing up stories that made Milley seem unintelligent and untrustworthy, according to sources. They said Trump's anger about Milley led him to be cavalier about what he said about the general, their interactions and policy decisions. It frustrated some Trump aides who noticed he would veer close to classified material in conversations.

So that set up the perfect storm when Trump met at Bedminster with two people working on the autobiography of Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, which was also attended by several aides of the former president, including communications specialist Margo Martin.
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Glasser, in an article published Wednesday by The New Yorker, wrote that Meadows’ autobiography, “The Chief’s Chief,” published in November 2021, actually included a “detailed account” of the Bedminster meeting. Here is how Glasser described the passage in the Meadows’ book:

With the “sound of children laughing” at the pool outside drifting into the room ... Trump, “dressed in a sport coat and crisp white shirt,” recalled “a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself” that purportedly “contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran.”

The meeting was taped and the audio recording eventually ended up in the hands of special counsel Jack Smith, who cited its contents in his indictment of Trump over the mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Meadows has testified to a federal grand jury as part of Smith’s investigation of Trump, which also covers the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. There has even been speculation that Meadows may be cooperating with Smith’s probe.
Trump made a misleading and deceptive claim that the document proved that it was Milley, not him, who wanted to attack Iran. It’s pretty clear that the document in question was a contingency plan for an attack on Iran—one of many similar documents that the Pentagon has drawn up but hopes never to have to use.
In a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday, Woodward said that Trump was certainly aware of the contingency plan for an attack on Iran because he had asked about it at two National Security Council meetings in mid-2020 attended by Milley and Marine Gen.Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., who is the commander of the United States Central Command, which would carry out any mission in Iran.
This came at a time when U.S. relations with Iran were very tense. Trump authorized the reckless Jan. 3, 2020, targeted drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. Iran retaliated days later with a missile strike on bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops.
Glasser wrote in her July 2021 article that Trump was being pressed after the November election by a circle of war hawks around him as well as by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to carry out strikes against Iran. Milley objected to this prospect and even flew to Israel to urge Netanyahu to back off, Glasser wrote.

Woodward told CNN:

“From the book `Peril,’ … we recount in detail two NSC meetings in which Trump talks about the Iran top secret contingency plan for attacking Iran. And this is the most sensitive of sensitive documents. … This is the kind of stuff that is at the top of the top secret chain.”

He added:

“It’s the detail about how we would attack . ... It’s Milley’s plan. He’s required to have these on-the-shelf contingency plans. But it is Trump who raises the issue. It is on June 3 , 2020, at the White House.
“They brought Gen. McKenzie, the CENTCOM commander to talk with Trump about withdrawing from … Afghanistan. And then Trump says ‘well what have we got for Iran’ and they literally go through it. And Milley is saying to the president ‘look there is a bad side of this. What would the casualties be, how many pilots are going to go down, how long will this war take — three days or 30 years?’ And in the second meeting, Gen. Milley is telling President Trump: ‘Don’t do it, you will start a war that you cannot get out of.”’

Fortunately, we had generals like Milley who were willing to speak truth to power even if it meant being forced to resign. If we had craven military leaders like in Russia, Trump might have blundered into a disastrous war against Iran just as Russian leader Vladimir Putin did in Ukraine.
Woodward agreed with Blitzer when the newsman said that Trump displayed “a cavalier attitude toward highly classified documents.”
“Of course, Trump is focused on himself rather than the responsibility as to the country or the military,” Woodward said. “And I see now why the prosecutors put this in, why they included it.”
Blitzer asked Woodward why Trump kept all these classified documents around Mar-a-Lago. Woodward replied that Trump “loves trophies.” He mentioned how in his interviews with Trump in the Oval Office, Trump offered to give him a picture of the president with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un—something that would normally go in the archives.
“I don’t think … he understands the responsibility of the presidency. He does not see that he’s got to protect the people. He’s got to protect the most confidential war plans that we’re not planning to do but you have to plan for what you might be required to respond to.”
In fact, an October 2022 CNN report on tapes of Woodward’s interviews with Trump showed that Trump had revealed classified information about U.S. weapons system to impress The Washington Post writer.

As described in “Peril,” Milley grew increasingly concerned throughout 2020 that Trump might start a war with Iran. That was one of the reasons, according to the book, that motivated a Jan. 8 call from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Milley, The Washington Post wrote:

“What precautions are available to prevent an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or from accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike?” Milley assured her that there were “a lot of checks in the system.”
The call transcript obtained by the authors shows Pelosi telling Milley, referring to Trump, “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. … He’s crazy and what he did yesterday is further evidence of his craziness.” Milley replied, “I agree with you on everything.”

Trump apparently never got over that remark by Milley. And Milley’s efforts to stop Trump from attacking Iran began a timeline leading to the recording that, if allowed at trial, might result in the first conviction of a former president for a federal crime.
Glasser concluded her latest story in The New Yorker by commenting:

What Milley had been so worried about in the final days of Trump’s Presidency was the spectre of an erratic leader, one who was cavalier with the nation’s secrets, impetuous in his thinking about war and peace, and consumed with himself and his effort to stay in power. All this was confirmed by Trump’s rant against him. “This totally wins my case,” Trump had said in the taped interview that will now be used against him in court. But it already seems clear that the case it proved was Milley’s.