Former President Donald Trump's attorney Tim Parlatore took to X on Friday to rant against Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, following a bombshell report in The Atlantic about how he and other generals had to restrain the former president's worst impulses, saying that Milley's account of what he did amounts to "tribal retribution" that is "reprehensible and disgusting."
"I have a few things to say about Mark Milley," said Parlatore. "As he goes off to retire, he will be remembered by many in the veteran community as the guy who led the efforts to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the terribly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan ... but see, to Mark Milley, that doesn't matter as much as his own reputation. That's why yesterday, The Atlantic published a glowing profile."
Parlatore took particular umbrage at the part of the article that discussed how Milley and his generals tried to stop him from canceling a rank demotion for Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was accused by his fellows of war crimes for attacking an unarmed ISIS fighter who was in custody.
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Gallagher wasn't convicted of that killing, but was convicted of photographing himself with the corpse, only to be pardoned of that offense by Trump. Parlatore was his lawyer in that case.
"Newsflash, Mark: Several months earlier, there was a jury verdict, constitutional jury verdict that said he was Not Guilty," said Parlatore. "This whole tribal justice that you're trying to push, or tribal retribution, was not something that was being done by the SEAL community at all, it was being done by one man. Admiral Collin Green, one of your senior officers. And as you were trying to protect your admiral buddy, very soon thereafter your boss, the Secretary of Defense, fired the Secretary of the Navy because of how that case had been badly botched."
The article revealed a number of other things about Trump's behavior behind the scenes, including that he dismissed the idea of Guam being nuked by North Korea because "Guam isn't America." (It is a U.S. territory.)
