Mark Milley Confirms Saying He’d Prevent Trump From Doing Anything ‘Crazy’

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley testifies before the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Defense on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 3, 2022. Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified last year that he agreed with the characterization of former President Donald Trump being “crazy” in a phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a conversation that some experts had earlier criticized as undermining the station of the president.

The testimony was released as part of a mass database published by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. In the testimony, Milley was asked about a call he received from Pelosi in which she raised concerns about Trump’s mental health. “You know he’s crazy, don’t you,” Pelosi reportedly said to Milley, a statement he agreed with.

Milley promised to guarantee Pelosi “110 percent” that they are not going to do anything “illegal or crazy” with regard to how military power, whether nuclear or otherwise, is used on a foreign country.

“You reassured her that despite her concerns about the president’s stability, the nuclear codes and the launch capacity has to go through this process, and you personally will ensure that nothing crazy, the word that you used, happens,” the committee member asks. Milley confirms it by responding, “That’s right.”

Milley told Pelosi that the military has “good, rigorous processes” that it will stick with, and execute in accordance with the law.

The Epoch Times reached out to Trump for comment.

Pelosi’s Dangerous Precedent

In March 2021, conservative watchdog Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking more information regarding Pelosi’s phone call with Milley following the Capitol breach on Jan. 6.

The phone call set “a dangerous precedent that could undermine the president’s role as commander in chief and the separation of powers” since it was only Trump who had control over U.S. nuclear weapons, said Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch.

Around the time of the call, Pelosi had also indicated invoking the 25th Amendment, which would have allowed Vice President Mike Pence and a majority of Trump’s cabinet to remove him from power.

In February 2021, several dozen Democrats had called on President Joe Biden to give up his sole presidential authority over nuclear codes. Three Republican members from the House Armed Services Committee warned against such a move, insisting that this could harm American security as well as the security of its allies.

Stripping away presidential authority over nuclear powers would destabilize the nuclear balance and only work to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, they stated.

Criticizing Flynn’s Comments

In his testimony, Milley also talked about some of the comments made by former national security adviser Michael Flynn regarding the use of military force during the 2020 election season that many had called controversial.

In an interview with Newsmax on Dec. 18, 2020, Flynn pointed out that Trump had the authority to use military capabilities in swing states to rerun the election process in these states. He noted that martial law has been instituted in the United States 64 times, and, as such, it is not something that the country has never done before.

“That’s an example of the chatter that—he wasn’t the only one. There was other stuff out there like that that was unnerving—in my view, unnerving to people, right, to the American people,” Milley said in his testimony.

Flynn’s statement had come in the context of allegations of election fraud which compromised the results of the 2020 presidential race. Trump needs to “plan for every eventuality because we cannot allow this election and the integrity of our election to go the way it is,” he said at the time.