The one way a White House staffer can get President Donald Trump to do what they want is by telling him that President Barack Obama would never have done it, a new report reveals.
According to the Independent, an anonymous staffer leaked that the way military leaders were able to urge Trump to act on the failed Yemen raid was by telling him Obama didn't want to do it.
General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, were reportedly able to persuade Trump to move forward by claiming Obama would never have been so bold to actually go through with it.
The military action was in the works for months prior to Trump taking over but Obama advisors didn't want to do the raid until it was a moonless night.
Still, the raid was a failure in that it killed 30 civilians, one U.S. Navy Seal and failed to meet the action's objective, which was to kill its alleged target, al Qaeda leader Qassim al Rimi.
The Independent cited an NBC News report that quoted a senior US intelligence official who claimed “almost everything went wrong” once the raid got underway. According to the official, those in the targeted house were alerted to the presence of the soldiers and they soon came under fire.
The Pentagon claimed that they were able to obtain "materials and information that is yielding valuable intelligence."