In this daily series, Newsweek explores the steps that led to the January 6 Capitol Riot.
Trump had grown to hate Esper, but it was still startling for a lame duck president to fire the most consequential member of the cabinet—the civilian leader of the military, the person in the chain of command for everything including launching nuclear weapons.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had called Esper earlier to tell him that the president was not happy with his performance, that he had not been sufficiently supportive, that Trump was going to announce the firing that very day. It was just a head's up.Esper thought to himself"Who?" according to an account in"I Alone Can Fix It" by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.
General Mark Milley and the Joint chiefs believed they had to protect the republic. General Milley with President Donald Trump in the Cabinet Room of the White House, on October 7, 2019.At the same time as the president's tweet went out, National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien called theto inform Gen. Milley that Miller and his principal assistant Kash Patel would be at the building very soon. And at 2:15 p.m., Miller arrived.
The new acting secretary was a former special operations officer and had retired from the Army in 2014, going on to work for a defense contractor before joining the White House two years earlier. He wasn't close to the president, but he was considered a member of his loyal group: one of the most loyal and therefore most dangerous in the eyes of D.C. national security experts. Patel was a former aide to Rep.
Though the intelligence was collected incidental to a Russia counterintelligence probe, Trump had a field day, claiming he was wiretapped by President Obama. The leak was followed by a Nunes memo alleging an FBI conspiracy against the new president.
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