Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who was fired by then-president Donald Trump in the weeks prior to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, is expected to throw his former boss under the bus when he testifies before Congress this week about the attack, according to a report by Axios.
Esper was replaced by Chris Miller, who outright blamed Trump for the deadly insurrection when he spoke to VICE Showtime in March.
“Would anybody have marched on the Capitol, and tried to overrun the Capitol, without the president’s speech? I think it’s pretty much definitive that wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
Miller said that he wasn’t clear on whether Trump fully understood what he was doing and what his supporters would do, but he made it clear that the attack never would have happened without Trump’s words.
“It seems cause-and-effect,” Miller said of Trump’s speech. “The question is, did he know he was enraging people to do that? I don’t know.”
Now, Mark Esper is reportedly going to address “unanswered questions” from the January 6 attack, including the slow response to deploying troops to the Capitol, Axios reported.