Former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said he did not authorize Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to have secret calls with a Chinese counterpart, calling the allegations “disgraceful,” according to a new report.
“The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking military officer whose sole role is providing military-specific advice to the president, and by law is prohibited from exercising executive authority to command forces,” Miller said in a statement to Fox News.
“The chain of command runs from the President to the Secretary of Defense, not through the Chairman,” the former defense secretary added.
Milley may have conspired last year to commit treason against then-President Donald Trump — and against the United States.
“Peril,” a new book from Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, alleges Milley called his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, just four days before the 2020 presidential election.
According to The Washington Post, Woodward and Costa wrote in “Peril,” that during the call, Milley said: “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
According to Woodward and Costa, Li “took the chairman at his word.”
Miller denied approving any such call.
“If the reporting in Woodward’s book is accurate, it represents a disgraceful and unprecedented act of insubordination by the Nation’s top military officer,” Miller told Fox News.
He added if the story of Milley’s “histrionic outbursts and unsanctioned, anti-Constitutional involvement in foreign policy prove true, he must resign immediately or be fired by the Secretary of Defense to guarantee the sanctity of the officer corps.”
According to CNN, the book highlights Milley’s words on Inauguration Day in 2021, when he was asked by former first lady Michelle Obama how he was feeling on the inauguration stage. “No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” Milley said. “You can’t see it under my mask, but I do.”
Milley had reportedly been afraid a coup was going to happen — particularly on Inauguration Day, when Washington was locked down with over 25,000 National Guard troops.
“Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys,” Milley told senior leaders, according to the book. “These are the same people we fought in World War II. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”
Milley also came under criticism recently when he said he wouldn’t rule out future partnerships with the Taliban.
Milley said that collaboration with the Taliban, who was the enemy during the 20-year Afghan war, was “possible” to battle the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate, according to a transcript of a media briefing.
The group reportedly claimed responsibility for the Aug. 26 attack that killed 13 U.S. military service members outside the Kabul airport.
More than 2,400 Americans died in the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin noted at the briefing that operational coordination between U.S. forces and ruthless Taliban fighters that took place while the United States was evacuating people from Kabul was not necessarily a harbinger of a future partnership.
“Well, first of all, let me applaud the initiative of our commanders on the ground who would stop at nothing to accomplish the mission that they were provided of evacuating as many American citizens, third-country nationals and [Special Immigrant Visa] applicants as possible. We were focused on — we were working with the Taliban on a very narrow set of issues, and it was just that — to get as many people out as we possibly could,” he said.
“And so I would not lead to — I would not make any leaps of logic to … broader issues,” Austin said.
“I would just say that, again, I’m immensely proud of what our troops have done to this point, and it’s hard to predict where this will go in the future with respect to the Taliban,” he said.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
