But Milley’s testimony may also open him up to questions about his last weeks and months serving Trump, highlighting how he has become one of the most politicized senior military leaders of recent times. He is one of several normally apolitical figures dragged into the partisan fray, largely due to extreme pressures imposed on the fabric of US government — and the barriers that normally exist between politics and the military — by the former commander in chief.
Milley’s own apparent willingness to cooperate with the accounts exposing the fraught final days of the Trump presidency has, meanwhile, opened him to criticism that he is playing his own political games. Milley was already a controversial figure after being forced to apologize for accompanying Trump to a notorious political photo op in Washington in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020. The stunt took place in Lafayette Square not long after the area had been violently cleared of demonstrators.
In the hearing on Tuesday, and a second session before the House Armed Services Committee the next day, Milley will come face-to-face with some of his most fervent Republican critics — some of whom will have every incentive to confront him given Trump’s antipathy for the general, whom he blasted as “stupid” at an incendiary rally in Georgia on Saturday night.
Republicans accused Milley of greatest military transgression
Milley heads into the hearing facing charges from Republicans that he went behind Trump’s back to assure China that the then-President wouldn’t stage an attack on the rising Asian superpower and of subverting civilian control of the military by warping the chain of command. In their new book, “Peril,” Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa report that Milley feared Trump’s mental condition had deteriorated seriously in his final days in office and that he called a meeting of top commanders to tell them not to take orders for military action, including with nuclear weapons, without talking to him.
“You never know what a President’s trigger point is,” Milley told his senior staff, according to the book, which also reported his contacts with top Chinese military officers.
Republicans, especially Sen. Marco Rubio, seized on the reports to accuse Milley…
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