The host of Bannon's War Room launched a full-throated fusillade against retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, detailing his disloyalty to the democratically elected commander-in-chief and the United States.
“The President of the United States is the commander in chief of the armed forces,” said Stephen K. Bannon, devoting the final segments of Saturday’s program to the retired general. “If you are a senior military, if you're a uniformed leader, and because you can't live with that, then you must resign.”
Steve Bannon, who served President Donald J. Trump as chief White House strategist during the president’s first year in office, said that he met with Milley and other Pentagon leaders in order to get them on board with Trump's national security agenda, specifically regarding the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“I was the point person for President Trump in '17 on getting us out of Afghanistan,” the former Navy destroyer deck watch officer said.
“They had so much time to plan for the Afghanistan withdrawal,” he said. “Remember, we didn't get it done in '17, and the reason we didn't get it done in '17 is that they kind of pushed President Trump into a corner and lied to him.”
Bannon said that in his experience with the Pentagon leadership, he was struck by the lack of candor and faithfulness to the facts.
The Pentagon was committed to keep operating in Afghanistan, he said.
“We were quite blunt to tell them they were wrong and what we were going to do, starting with getting out of Afghanistan, and Milley and these guys plotted from the beginning to thwart Trump,” he said.
“We extended it even more, and they swore every year: ‘Oh, it's only going to be five or 10 billion,’ it was like 40 or 50 billion every year just into a rat hole—just into a total rat hole driven by the defense industry and the greed of the defense industry,” he said.
“I hate to say this, as much as I love the military and the Navy, the military, DOD, the national security state will look you straight in the eye, and they will lie to you,” he said.
“They will lie to you,” he said. “You sit there and ask the most basic questions, the most basic questions about operation, about costs, about projections, about what's going to happen. It's either through gross incompetence or you just get outright lies.”
When Milley conducted his exit interview with Norah O’Donnell on “60 Minutes,” she asked the general if, given the lives lost and the number of wounded, the Afghanistan war was worth the effort and sacrifice.
Bannon said Willey whiffed with his non-committal answer:
Was it worth it? Look, I can't answer that for other people. This is a tough business that we're in, this military business. It's unforgiving, the crucible of combat's unforgiving. People die; they lose their arms, they lose their legs. It's an incredibly difficult life, but is it worth it? Look around, you ask yourself the question. For me, I've answered it many times over, and that's why I stay in uniform and that's why I maintain my oath.
“I mean, and folks, a '60 Minutes' interview, where they're going up to the Constitution in Boston Harbor, and they have a huge crew,” he said. “They've set this up and cleared with the Pentagon. It's not like they called the guy and saw him in a taxi line, say: ‘Hey, we've got a couple of questions for you, Milley.’”
Bannon said the terms for the interview would have been negotiated for weeks with the Pentagon, including the topics of the questioning, but Milley was woefully underprepared to answer that crucial question.
Milley could not bring himself to mention the 13 servicemembers killed Aug. 26, 2021, at Abbey Gate of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, he said.
“It’s not just unfeeling. There's this attitude that doesn't matter, that just what matters is the continuation of these forever wars, the continuation of these forever wars, and it's this mentality," he said.
Milley, Esper formed an anti-Trump pact
The host said Milley and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper worked together to undermine Trump, and that pact was formalized after the rioters triggered by the May 25, 2020, drug overdose death of George Floyd.
Those rioters attacked federal and local law enforcement securing the White House grounds, and the confrontations extended out into Lafayette Square—leading to the May 31, 2020, attempt to burn down the square’s historic St. John’s Church.
In a classic example of the mainstream media’s tone during the protests following the drug overdose death of George Floyd, The Washington Post at least conceded there was a fire.
Although the protests were largely peaceful in the afternoon and evening, small groups of people began setting fires and smashing windows once darkness fell.
Shortly after 10 p.m., someone tore down the American flag that hangs outside the butter-yellow church and appeared to toss the flag into a nearby fire. A glass door or window was shattered.
A person sprayed graffiti: “The Devil is across [the] street.”
D.C. police said a small fire was deliberately set in the basement. Under police escort, D.C. firefighters quickly extinguished it. Fire department spokesman Vito Maggiolo said the blaze did not appear to cause any significant damage.
The next day, Trump walked out to the church to assert that he would maintain law and order, joined by members of his staff, cabinet, and Milley.
Bannon said Milley’s apology for appearing at the church—and making an anti-Trump pact with Esper—was a disgrace.
“You can't make your own deal up that's you and Esper,” he said.
"Remember what happened is that they got crushed by the media that afternoon. They went back, and Esper talks about this, and he and Milley made a pact. The secretary of defense and the chairman made a pact to thwart Trump, to thwart the commander-in-chief,” he said.
Bannon said that despite Esper and Milley having issues with Trump, they did not resign and did not approach the president with their misgivings with proposals for Trump to invoke the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and the Insurrection Act of 1807.
"Did they ever go over to talk to Trump and lay this out?” he asked.
“They never went back to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and had that conversation ever,” he said.
“The issues they had, did they ever go over and actually have a conversation? ‘Hey, we don't actually, upon further review [back] the insurrection act--the riots are going on,'” he said. “We got to have a talk about posse comitatus—we have to have a talk about our thing.”
Bannon: Milley’s ChiCom hotline ‘basically a coup’
The Harvard Business School MBA said Milley crossed the line when the general held regular conversations with Gen. Li Zuocheng, chief of the People’s Liberation Army, promising to give the ChiComs the heads-up if Trump launched an attack against Red China.
“After Jan. 6, he was making phone calls, unauthorized phone calls to the Chinese Communist Party, the PLA leader, to imply Trump's a madman,” he said. “The military is basically doing a coup.”
The message to the ChiComs was to listen to their friend Milley: “If the commander-in-chief orders something, we're not going to do it. You got to be advised of that,” he said.
Even though Milley defended his calls to Red China's military leadership as authorized, Bannon said he never asked permission to make the calls from Trump, his boss, nor did he inform Trump after he made the calls.
In the book “Peril,” Robert Woodward and Robert Costa also detailed how Milley gave orders to Pentagon staff to ignore all orders from Trump and to route those orders to him. This conduct alone violated the Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act of 1986. Goldwater-Nichols clarified that the chain of command does not run through the chairman of the joint chiefs and that the law walled off the chairman's role as strictly the senior uniformed advisor to the president.
Bannon's take is consistent with how Congress created the modern office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In effect, what Milley did was leverage his personal rank and his control over his personal staff to usurp a bottleneck in the chain of command entirely outside the law and, given his intentions, outside the Constitution.
Bannon said Milley from the beginning of the Trump presidency was opposed to the president’s reworking of America’s role in the world and the primacy of other countries at the expense of the United States.
“Right there, the heart of it, the heart of the problem, is the post-war international rules-based order. It's a fetish to these people,” he said.
This was a point Milley himself made in the last paragraph of his unsubmitted, but later released, resignation letter.
And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you're ruining the international order and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.
Bannon said when Milley did not back away from his opposition to Trump in the “60 Minutes” interview.
Milley, appearing in his uniform, said to O’Donnell: “I would say there was a wide variety of initiatives that were ongoing. One of them, of course, was withdrawing troops out of NATO—those were initiatives that placed at risk, you know, America’s place in the world.”
Bannon said Milley was his own worst witness.
“You damned yourself with your own words, and you are going to be held accountable—right there shows you his treason right there, shows you his plotting.”