Trump's Pentagon chief mocks lawmakers for 'hyperventilating' on Jan. 6

The former acting Secretary of Defense who was in charge when rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 mocks "hyperventilating" lawmakers in his new book, describing them as cowering in fear.

In his memoir "Soldier Secretary," Chris Miller says he was "unapologetically unbothered by the danger that elected officials were in on January 6th," according to The Bulwark's Amanda Carpenter.

"In the opening pages of his memoir, he describes then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as being 'in a state of total nuclear meltdown' and other congressional leaders 'hyperventilating' in their calls for help that day," Carpenter writes. "He is smug, smirking over how the speaker decried the use of National Guard troops to put down Black Lives Matters protests, but 'as soon as it was her ass on the line, Pelosi had been miraculously born again as a passionate, if less than altruistic, champion of law and order.'"

Miller mocks lawmakers who were at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, writing, “I have never seen anyone — not even the greenest, pimple-faced 19-year-old Army private — panic like our nation’s elder statesmen did on January 6 and in the months that followed.”

“Do I blame a bunch of geriatrics for acting like a bunch of geriatrics? Of course not," writes Miller. "But do I judge them for it? You’re damned right I do. Most of all, I resent that we are ruled by a bunch of geriatrics that ruthlessly and selfishly maintain their hold on power and refuse to develop the next generation of leaders.”

Miller was appointed to a high-level National Security Council post by Trump in 2018 and he was fully on board with the former President's plans to withdraw from Afghanistan. After ascending to the top Pentagon job, his goals for his tenure were “no new wars, no military coups, and no troops in the streets deployed against American citizens.” His wife, who was not a Trump supporter, had previously warned him against joining the Trump administration, and on the day of Jan. 6, he started to think she may have been right. In his book, he defended his decision not to deploy the National Guard on the day of the riot.

"I represented the executive branch, the military. You do not go to Capitol Hill with the military unless you are invited by congressional leadership. If you do anything different, that’s called a military coup, and I was really, really concerned about that," Miller said in an MSNBC interview. "If I would have put additional troops up on Capitol Hill that morning, I think you guys would have been probably losing your minds about . . . a military coup going on, and I wasn’t going to be part of that."

“That’s what we have cops for,” he said. “People don’t join the military to fight their own citizens.” His anxieties about this were so pronounced that he developed a concern that “the opposition that day was setting up for a Boston Massacre moment."

Read the full story over at The Bulwark.