John Kelly And Co. Have Some Serious Credibility Issues

Fired White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is once again peddling outlandish claims about Donald Trump’s supposed disdain for the military in a last-ditch attempt to thwart the former president’s return as the duly elected commander-in-chief.

Last week, The Atlantic published another hit piece on the Republican presidential nominee strikingly similar to the smear run by the magazine four years ago, which accused then-President Trump of denigrating fallen veterans as “suckers” and “losers.” According to Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who relied entirely on anonymous sources for the election-year hit in 2020, Trump had refused to visit the graves of American World War I soldiers at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, during a 2018 trip to France out of animosity for the dead veterans.

“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Goldberg claimed Trump said.

The anonymously sourced story, however, was immediately debunked by more than a dozen officials who went on record to dispute The Atlantic’s attempted character assassination of a president known for his embrace of the U.S. military. Even his former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who traveled with the president to France in 2018 before becoming one of Trump’s chief antagonists in the media, publicly declared Goldberg’s claims false four years ago.

“The main issue was whether or not weather conditions permitted the president to go out to the Aisne-Marne cemetery,” Bolton explained on Fox News, with inclement weather leading officials to cancel the presidential visit over safety concerns.

While nearly every White House official involved with the trip denied The Atlantic’s claims about Trump’s reason to refrain from visiting the overseas cemetery, John Kelly, who was likely one of the paper’s four anonymous sources for the original article, went on to “confirm” the story on record three years later. Now Kelly is being cited in The Atlantic’s latest election-year hit on the former president, which attacks him for supposedly admiring the generals of Adolf Hitler

“This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange,” Goldberg reported.

He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.

Goldberg also alleged that Trump disparaged a soldier murdered at Fort Hood, Texas, following an Oval Office visit with the victim’s family. After Trump pledged to cover the funeral costs beyond the military’s initial benefits, Goldbgerg wrote that the president complained about the price.

“It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f-cking Mexican!” Trump is accused of telling then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Nearly a dozen sources have gone on the record again to refute Goldberg’s latest hit, including Meadows and myriad other administration staff. The family of the deceased soldier whose death Democrats politicized in order to call Trump a racist also blasted the magazine’s reporting.

“Wow. I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics — hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” Mayra Guillén, the fallen soldier’s sister, wrote in an online post. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”

Others who have publicly disputed Goldberg’s latest reporting include the Guillén family’s attorney, Meadows spokesman Ben Williamson, Trump spokesman Alex Pfeiffer, former Pentagon Chief of Staff Kash Patel, former White House deputy assistant Theo Wold, former vice presidential chief of staff Nick Ayers, and former vice presidential national security adviser Keith Kellogg.

There are a few people who say they believe Kelly, but they share similar credibility problems with the disgruntled ex-chief of staff.

Retired Army Reserve Col. Kevin Carroll, who was identified by USA Today as a former senior adviser to Kelly, told reporters during a campaign call for Vice President Kamala Harris that Kelly’s activism was “no small step” for the former senior Trump official.

“He’s seen Donald Trump up close in a way that very few other Americans have,” Carroll is reported as saying. “He’s warning us that a second Trump term would be dangerous.”

A former Trump official familiar with Carroll’s role in the administration, however, characterized him in an interview with The Federalist as a “disgruntled, unprofessional attorney.” More importantly, the official said, “he wasn’t really a close confidante of General Kelly.”

Exaggeration of White House influence is a theme among former Trump officials who’ve exploited legacy media’s hostility toward the former president. In 2018, for example, The New York Times published an op-ed from an anonymous author identified as a “senior administration official” who described deep state efforts to undermine the president’s agenda from within the upper echelons of the federal government. The author was later unmasked as a low-level bureaucrat within the Department of Homeland Security.

Kelly himself is faced with charges of deceiving President Trump when he worked to actively undermine the administration as White House chief of staff. Last week, Mark Paoletta, an attorney and veteran of the Trump administration who worked in the Office of Management and Budget, detailed Kelly’s dynamic on X. In 2018, for example, Kelly prevented White House officials from briefing Trump on the available funds to build the southern border wall. Kelly would later call the wall, which was a hallmark promise of Trump’s 2016 campaign, a “waste of money” during an interview at Duke University a year later.

“John Kelly was insubordinate and duplicitous by refusing to provide the President with lawful options to implement the President’s policies,” Paoletta wrote last week.

In another incident, Paoletta said Kelly shut down a recommendation directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate election fraud.

“At the time, I was the Counsel to VP Pence, who was the co-chair of the commission, and I had developed a list of previous presidential directives to DOJ to investigate a specific matter so that when making this recommendation I could show it was well supported by history and tradition,” Paoletta said. “In a meeting with Kelly and others, I made this recommendation and shared the list of examples of Presidents directing DOJ to engage on specific matters. Kelly said he would never show this list to the President because it would be terrible if President Trump knew he could do this.”

“John Kelly thought he knew better than President Trump and was opposed to many of his policies,” Paoletta added. “As Chief of Staff, Kelly dishonestly tried to thwart President Trump’s policies, and on the wall funding he was totally fine with not doing everything possible to stop illegal aliens flooding into our country and murdering innocent Americans, all in order to protect the bloated bureaucracy of his DOD.”

On CNN last weekend, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said Kelly and his followers among Trump’s deep state opposition were just neocons who pushed for “ridiculous wars.”

“Donald Trump wouldn’t listen to the leadership of the military when they wanted him to start ridiculous conflicts,” Vance said Sunday. “A lot of former members of the Pentagon bureaucracy, a lot of neoconservatives, they have a fundamental difference with Donald Trump on the question of peace and war.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected]. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.