Then-president Donald Trump reportedly became incensed with retired US Navy Admiral William McRaven and retired US Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and demanded they be recalled to active duty so they could be court-martialed for publicly criticizing him, according to a new book authored by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Business Insider reports.
McRaven, who appeared in an iconic photo with President Barack Obama, led the special operations team that stormed a compound in Islamabad, Pakistan where Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2011.
According to The Insider, Esper claims in his newly released book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times,” that Trump was furious with McRaven’s comments and had to be talked down by himself and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
Trump was eventually dissuaded from his court-martial threat after Milley promised to “personally call the officers and ask them to dial it back,” according to Esper.
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“Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper writes that he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley had to talk then-President Trump out of a plan to recall both retired US Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and McRaven to active duty as a way to open the two former senior military officers up to court-martial proceedings,” Esper says in his book.
The insider also reported that “Trump told Esper and Milley that McRaven and McChrystal were ‘so disloyal’ because of what they were doing and had said about him.
Esper writes that Trump was ‘spun up’ by media stories in Breitbart alleging that McChrystal was advising Democrats on how to use artificial intelligence to ‘track down and counter Trump supporters’.”
Read the full report in Business Insider.
