Mark Milley, the retired U.S. Army general and former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, worries that Donald Trump will order a military trial against him if re-elected, according to a new book.
Veteran journalist Bob Woodward reveals in his new book, "War," that Milley recently “warned former colleagues that Trump intends to recall and then court martial retired senior officers who have criticized him as part of a wide-ranging revenge campaign he has pledged to carry out in a possible second term as president, according to excerpts published by The Guardian.
“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley said, according to Woodward. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him," including Steve Bannon, his former White House chief strategist who's now jailed for contempt of Congress, who has urged Trump to hold Milley "accountable" for his criticism.
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Former defense secretary Mark Esper told Woodward about a 2020 Oval Office meeting where Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven, a former Navy admiral who led the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal, a retired special forces general whose troops killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.
“As commander-in-chief, Trump had extraordinary power over retired commissioned officers," Woodward wrote. "It was within his authority to recall them to active duty and court martial them. But it had only been done a few times in American history and for very serious crimes. For instance, when a retired two-star [general] was charged in 2017 with six counts of raping a minor while on active duty in the 1980s.”
Esper and Milley both urged Trump not to punish McRaven and McChrystal for their criticism, saying they had a right to express their opinions and warning the move would backfire and draw attention to their criticism, but Woodward said "the president didn’t want to hear it."
Milley then assured the former president that he would take care of the situation, and he called both retired military officials and warned them to "pull it back" and "step off the public stage."
Since retiring, however, Milley has "received a non-stop barrage of death threats" that he believes are motivated by Trump's efforts to discredit him.
“‘He is inciting people to violence with violent rhetoric,’ Milley told his wife, according to Woodward. ‘But he does it in such a way it’s through the power of suggestion, which is exactly what he did on Jan. 6. ... As a former chairman, Milley was provided round-the-clock government security for two years. But he had taken additional precautions at significant personal expense, installing bullet-proof glass and blast-proof curtains at his home.”