Trump’s ‘Body Guy’ And Confidante ‘Forged’ Directive For Massive Withdrawal of US Troops, Per Shocking Report
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
A shocking new report claimed Donald Trump’s “ultimate loyalist” in the White House created a fake presidential directive that could have shifted “the global order” if carried out.
In a Vanity Fair excerpt from his new book, “Tired of Winning”, ABC’s Jonathan Karl revealed that a young Trump aid named Johnny McEntee wielded a tremendous amount of power in the White House. He was referred to as Trump’s “body guy,” because he carried the president’s bags. Trump reportedly welcomed McEntee’s intense loyalty, and soon the 30-year old was suggesting major personnel decisions, including firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
In the waning days of the Trump administration, Karl wrote that McEntee made up a “handwritten to-do list” ordering massive troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Somalia.
The list, as first reported by Axios, read:
Get us out of Afghanistan.
Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
Get us out of Africa.
McEntee typed up the order using language and formatting copied from an “old presidential decision memorandum.” The paper directed the Pentagon to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2020, and from Somalia by December 31, 2020, Karl wrote, adding:
An order even 10 percent as consequential as the one McEntee was drafting would typically go through the National Security Council with input from the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the military commanders in the region. Instead, the guy who usually carried Trump’s bags was hammering it out on his computer, consulting with nobody but the retired colonel the president had just hired because he had seen him on cable TV.
Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley reportedly balked when he read the order, asking other Pentagon officials, “Who gave the president the military advice for this?”
When no one had an answer, Milley marched over to the White House and presented the directive to the national security advisor to the Vice President who said it didn’t “look right.”
“You’re telling me that thing is forged?” Milley reportedly responded with incredulity. “That’s a forged piece of paper directing a military operation by the president of the United States?”
Milley, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone then went in search of the president, who was in his private dining room next to the Oval Office. They presented him with the fake directive typed up by McEntee. Karl wrote:
Once the president confirmed he had indeed signed the document, O’Brien and Cipollone explained to him that such an order should go through some sort of process, and that an abrupt movement of so many US troops would be dangerous and unwise without proper planning. At the very least, they told him, such an order should be reviewed by White House lawyers.
“I said this would be very bad,” O’Brien recalled telling Trump. “Our position is that because it didn’t go through any proper process—the lawyers hadn’t cleared it, the staff [secretary] hadn’t cleared it, NSC [National Security Council] hadn’t cleared it—that it’s our position that the order is null and void.”
Karl wrote that the president, who had just days remaining in office before the Biden administration moved in, “didn’t object” to his advisors’ arguments.
Read the Vanity Fair article by Jonathan Karl here.
