Milley disputes claim he recommended Trump attack Iran [View all]
Source: CNN Politics
Updated 11:10 PM EDT, Wed September 13, 2023
CNN — Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview Wednesday that he never recommended a US military attack on Iran during the Trump administration, pushing back on claims made by former President Donald Trump and his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. “I can assure you that not one time have I ever recommended to attack Iran,” Milley said.
Milley, an Army general who is retiring at the end of the month as the nation’s top military officer, was Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the final 16 months of his time in office. He had an outsized role in some of the most consequential events of Trump’s presidency, including the response to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and actions he took after January 6, 2001, when he was concerned that Trump could go “rogue.”
Milley also became a significant figure in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents, when Trump claimed to have a plan to attack Iran authored by Milley. Trump was captured on audio tape talking about the plan with biographers for Meadows in July 2021 at his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort, acknowledging he had not declassified the document.
“As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t,” Trump says of the document, according to the transcript of the tape, which was first reported by CNN. Milley told Zakaria he did not know the specific document Trump was referring to. CNN has previously reported it was not authored by Milley.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/13/politics/milley-cnn-interview-trump-iran/index.html
= new reply since forum marked as read