Robert Costa Insists Milley’s China Call Wasn’t ‘Rogue’ But Believed Trump Had ‘Serious Mental Decline’

General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has faced scrutiny and calls for his resignation over two calls made to his Chinese counterpart in the last days of the Trump administration to calm fears that the U.S. was planning to attack China.

Those calls, the first which came days before the 2020 election and the second days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, were revealed in Peril, a new book by Robert Costa and Bob Woodward.

Some Republican lawmakers have called on Milley to resign, accusing him of seeking to undermine then-President Donald Trump and usurp civilian control of the military. Milley has defended his actions as legal.

In an interview on Good Morning America Monday, Woodward and Costa insisted the calls were not “hidden” from others in the administration, despite being on a “top secret backchannel.”

“The Chinese were highly alarmed by what happened on January 6th,” Costa said. “What Chairman Milley was trying to do, as we show in the book, was contain a national security emergency.”

“He was reading people in. While these calls with General Lee were held on a top-secret backchannel, they were not secret. This was not someone who was working in isolation.”

“He was not going rogue?” ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos asked.

“He was not going rogue,” Costa said. “He was reading people in throughout the national security and military community, trying to contain a situation, and a president who he believed was in serious mental decline.”

Watch above, via ABC News.