EXCLUSIVE: A former assistant secretary of the Army under President Trump has accused top military officials Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Chief of Staff of the U. S. Army Gen. James McConville of engaging in a “pattern of behavior” that overstepped their authority and undermined potential commands from Trump.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, E. Casey Wardynski, a former assistant secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs under the Trump administration, accused high-ranking military officials Milley and McConville of making statements that insinuated they were calling the shots.
“These kind of behaviors and this willingness for military leaders to exceed their authorities and ignore authorities of the civilian officials appointed over them … positions under the Constitution and laws of the country was not something that came to them on Jan. 8,” Wardynski said. “It was something that they had done for a while.”
According to Wardynski, there were “stunning” instances in which he saw, firsthand, high-ranking military officials exceed their authority.
“It was in and around the riots in D. C.,” Wardynski said. “Gen. Milley, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – first thing to know, is he is a staff officer, he is an adviser, he’s not a commander – he ordered elements of the 82nd Airborne and the 10th Mountain Division to fly overnight to D.C. to Fort Belvoir and Andrews without consulting the Army chain of command and reaching around the chain of command to do that. I know that for a fact.”
New revelations in a book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa claim Milley made two phone calls to Chinese officials in fear that Trump would create conflict with the nation, telling the officials that he would forewarn about an attack planned by the U. S. on China. The book claims that Milley contacted his Chinese counterpart after he had reviewed intelligence that suggested Chinese officials believed the United States was planning an attack on China amid military exercises in the South China Sea.
Trump has said the behavior, if true, amounted to “treason.” Milley has defended the contacts with China as “routine.”
Wardynski went on to detail two separate occasions when McConville told him that he “would not be obeying any illegal orders from the president” amid several violent riots across the nation in the summer of 2020, particularly in D. C.
“That’s not something in 30 years of service in that uniform I thought I’d ever hear,” Wardynski said. “My interpretation of that was he was talking about any use of the Insurrection Act by the president.”
The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows a president to deploy U. S. militarized forces and National Guard troops should there be extreme civil disobedience or an insurrection.
“There was a lot of talk about governors and mayors not enforcing the law,” he added, providing context to the nature of ongoing events at that time. “A lot of Secret Service agents were hurt at the White House, a lot of national guardsmen were hurt at the White House, at one point it was reported that they evacuated the president to the emergency operations center, and of course Milley ordered these two units flown to D. C.”
Later that year, around October of 2020, McConville told Wardynski once more that he would “not obey illegal orders from the president,” prompting Wardynski to call his lawyer, the number-three attorney for the Army at the time, as the election neared, according to Wardynski.
In the phone call, Wardynski said he expressed concern over potential “unrest around the election,” warning the attorney about milit… (Read more)
