Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is now telling his truth, which could mean a few things:
- He’s gotten a grim medical diagnosis and wants to make right with the Lord.
- He’s got a book to promote.
- He really hates Trump now and wants to stick it to him.
Whatever the reason, Kelly is now ready to tell his truth or the truth, or the truth he didn’t tell when he was inside the White House.
During a 75-minute speech and Q&A session at Drew University in New Jersey on Wednesday, Kelly claimed that impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council aide, was just doing his job when he told what actually happened during Trump’s shady AF phone call with Ukrainian President Scoopy Howtow (like you know his name!).
Kelly said that Vindman—who was released from his position by Trump as soon as the president was acquitted—“is blameless and was simply following the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants are ‘overwhelmingly good people’ and ‘not all rapists’; and Trump’s decision to condition military aid to Ukraine on an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden upended long-standing U.S. policy.”
Well, look who’s got a spine! Look at John Kelly, y’all, all moral and shit.
Man, fuck John Kelly.
Don’t forget that it was John Kelly who held a press conference to defend Trump’s October 2017 phone call with the widow of a U.S. serviceman killed in an ambush in Niger in which Trump claimed that her husband “knew what he signed up for, but I guess it still hurt.” Florida congresswoman Frederica Wilson was in the car with the widow when Trump called and later came out to say the president was mad insensitive. Kelly didn’t just defend the president; he attacked and lied on Wilson, calling her “the empty barrel that makes the most noise” and stating in a 2015 speech that Wilson “stood up” to “claim credit for securing federal funding for an FBI building in her district.” Video of the event showed that Kelly was lying.
And it was Kelly who told a Fox News host in 2017 that “lack of an ability to compromise” on slavery led America into the Civil War. In the same interview, he hailed Gen. Robert E. Lee as “an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state”—which is one way to describe a torturous masochist.
So, yeah, fuck John Kelly and his newfound moral high ground.
From the Atlantic:
Vindman was rightly disturbed by Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July, Kelly suggested: Having seen something “questionable,” Vindman properly notified his superiors, Kelly said. Vindman, who specialized in Ukraine policy at the National Security Council at the time, was among multiple U.S. officials who listened in on the call. When subpoenaed by Congress in the House impeachment hearings, Vindman complied and told the truth, Kelly said.
“He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” Kelly told the audience at the Mayo Performing Arts Center. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.”
Although Trump has long insisted that his call to Zelensky was “perfect,” Kelly made clear that Trump indeed conditioned military aid on Zelensky’s help digging up dirt on the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Kelly claimed that the moment Trump ended the call with the Ukrainian president, U.S. policy with Ukraine shifted and Vindman was right to explain what he’d heard because that change needed to be noted.
“Through the Obama administration up until that phone call, the policy of the U.S. was militarily to support Ukraine in their defensive fight against…the Russians,” Kelly said. “And so, when the president said that continued support would be based on X, that essentially changed. And that’s what that guy [Vindman] was most interested in.”
Kelly claimed that when Trump made his quid pro quo request demanding that the Biden family be investigated in exchange for congressionally approved aid, Vindman had essentially heard “an illegal order.”
“We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”
Kelly had all kinds of things to say NOW about Trump’s policies and even his two trips to North Korea to meet with tiny leader Kim Jong Un.
“He will never give his [Jong Un] nuclear weapons up,” Kelly said. “Again, President Trump tried—that’s one way to put it. But it didn’t work. I’m an optimist most of the time, but I’m also a realist, and I never did think Kim would do anything other than play us for a while, and he did that fairly effectively.”
The Atlantic even notes that “At times Wednesday, Kelly sounded like the anti-Trump.”
The mag reports that Kelly now doesn’t believe that the press is “the enemy of the people” or that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “rational actor,” a vast difference from Trump, who is currently trying to get Putin to make their relationship IG official.
Man, Kelly is so full of shit he’s now even dogging the president’s border wall, claiming that it doesn’t need to extend “from sea to shining sea”; yet he was responsible, during his time in Trump’s administration, with advancing building a border wall.
So yeah, fuck John Kelly and the corrupt bed of lies he sleeps on at night and the book he may or may not be writing, or whatever it is he’s trying to do to ensure that his soul doesn’t spend an eternity trying to figure out how to turn this damn heat down.