Free Republic

Friday on CNN, host John King played a clip of a new interview between former Trump administration communications director Anthony Scaramucci and former chief of staff John Kelly. Kelly was commenting on former Defense Secretary James Mattis denouncing the Trump administration for using Washington, DC police and National Guard troops to clear out protesters from Lafayette Square for Trump’s visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church.

General John Kelly could be the next retired general to rebuke Donald Trump for calling in active duty military in the midst of George Floyd protests – as the former chief of staff called the president 'nasty' for his comments about General Jim Mattis. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, defended Trump's former Defense secretary on Thursday after Mattis publicly criticized the president's handling of the nationwide protests. He also shot down Trump's claim that he fired Mattis in 2018.

Hearing what Gen “Mad Dog” Mattis had to say today, I am reminded of something I learned about Trump’s pick for Sec Def during the transition, as the President-elect was about to take the oath of office. Several sources inside the transition team confirmed... They were shocked by who Mattis wanted as his number 2 - he was pushing for Michelle Flournoy, the same person HRC had reportedly picked to lead DOD in her Administration, acc to sources/articles at the time, such as one Politico published in Nov 2016. They put it this way: “THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION - HILLARY CLINTON’S...

 Click here to watch the short video in which Dan Bongino explains the apparent talk of mutiny among top military leaders. 

Secretary of Defense James Mattis is implicated in one of the largest business scandals of the past decades, described by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “elaborate, years-long fraud” through which Theranos, led by CEO Elizabeth Holmes and president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, “exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.” Basically, their biotech startup was founded on the promise of faster, cheaper, painless blood tests. But their technology was fake. Mattis not only served on Theranos’s board during some of the years it was perpetrating the fraud after he retired from US military service,...

President Trump tweeted a copy of a letter from John Dowd, one of the lead lawyers who represented him during the Russia investigation, addressed to former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. The letter penned by Dowd denounced Mattis for criticizing the president’s approach to protesters in front of the White House. “The peaceful protesters near Lafayette park were not peaceful and are not real. They are terrorists using idle hate filled students to burn and destroy,” Dowd wrote, referring to the peaceful protesters at Lafayette Square who were forcefully dispersed. After the protestors fled from the square, Trump walked through the...

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) asserted Thursday that former Secretary of Defense James Mattis calling President Donald Trump a threat to the U.S. Constitution was “true, honest, necessary, and overdue.” Murkowski, one of the Senate’s most left-leaning Republicans, made the comment while speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill. Asked whether she supports President Trump, the lawmaker replied,” “I am struggling with it [ and] I have struggled with it for a long time.” On Wednesday, Mattis attacked President Trump in a statement to The Atlantic by accusing the president of violating the Constitution over the clearing of Lafayette Park on Monday...

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Probably the only thing Barack Obama & I have in common is that we both had the honor of firing Jim Mattis, the world’s most overrated General. I asked for his letter of resignation, & felt great about it. His nickname was “Chaos”, which I didn’t like, & changed to “Mad Dog”... ...His primary strength was not military, but rather personal public relations. I gave him a new life, things to do, and battles to win, but he seldom “brought home the bacon”. I didn’t like his “leadership” style or much else about him, and many...

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis went on record Tuesday to defend Glenn Fine, the Pentagon inspector general relieved of his duties by President Trump earlier in the day. “Mr. Fine is a public servant in the finest tradition of honest. Competent governance,” Mattis wrote in an email to Yahoo News. “In my years of extensive engagement with him as our Department of Defense’s acting Inspector General, he proved to be a leader whose personal and managerial integrity were always of the highest order.” Mattis, 69, a retired U.S. Marine Corps general, served as defense secretary from January 2017 to January...

  With his resignation and a new book coming out the Left was eager to hear Mattis snipe at Trump. They weren’t expecting him to jackhammer their ‘Scandal-Free’ golden boy.One of the most controversial decisions of Obama’s presidency was the Iran deal.Obama had to give up a HELL of a lot to make his Iran deal happen, and every new revelation makes that ‘deal’ he struck look even worse. Prior be being Secretary of Defense under Trump, Mattis served as commander of U.S. Central Command under Obama and Biden. Mattis had predicted that Iran would continue to provoke the...

Former secretary of defense James Mattis repeatedly refused MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell's invitations to criticize President Donald Trump in an interview Thursday. Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, resigned in December over policy differences with Trump, specifically the president's decision to withdraw American troops from Syria. Mattis, an advocate of cultivating alliances and American engagement, said he had "no choice" but to depart. Mitchell quoted a portion of Mattis's new book Call Sign Chaos that criticized the Obama administration—including former vice president and 2020 candidate Joe Biden—for leaving the Middle East in "disarray" and "our friends confused." "Aren't we at...

During former Defense Secretary James Mattis's MSNBC interview with Andrea Mitchell, he refused to criticize President Trump, even though she pressed him firmly to do so on various issues. Mitchell tried to get Mattis to say Thursday if he thinks he is "normalizing" decisions Trump makes by not saying how he truly feels about them, such as when former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired via Twitter. Each time, Mattis maintained that it is inappropriate for former military men and administration officials to undermine the current commander in chief. "Your personal library has thousands, thousands, 7,000 books in it....

The current story is that Mattis is writing his memoir and that got the media press corp really excited. You see, because Mattis left on rocky terms from the Trump administration, including a fairly forward resignation letter, the expectation was that he was going to blast Trump. So you got headlines like The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore from The Atlantic and The Man Trump Wishes He Were from The New York Times. You could almost see the foam forming around their collective mouths. They were about to get another tell all they could fluff for weeks, and if...

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has expressed willingness to aid a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia by victims of the attack if the federal government does not seek the death penalty against him, according to The Wall Street Journal. Mohammed’s offer was first made public in a filing Friday as part of the federal lawsuit, which seeks to hold the Saudi government responsible for assisting in the attacks, a charge the Saudis have denied. Lawyers for the plaintiffs reportedly reached out to three of five Guantanamo Bay prisoners accused of conspiring in the...

The Senate confirmed former Army Lt. Col. Mark Esper as Secretary of Defense Tuesday, making him the first permanent Pentagon boss since James Mattis resigned last December. Esper, who served 10 years on active duty and 11 years in the National Guard and Army Reserve, was Acting Secretary before his nomination, and Patrick Shanahan had been Acting Secretary prior to that. The vote was not close, with the Senate confirming Esper by a vote of 90-8. The no votes included 2020 Democratic presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.

On Morning Joe, Tuesday, Mika Brzezinski says she'd "love to hear" from former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis or other former members of the Trump administration to hear about the "dysfunction" in the Trump administration and the "erosion of our credibility on the world stage." Brzezinski implored Mattis to contact her to trash the Trump administration and the standing of the United States in the world. The moment came after the BBC's Katty Kay said that foreign allies have become skeptical of US claims regarding Iran, and would need hard evidence before supporting any American move in the area. Said Brzezinski:...

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis declined to carry out orders from President Trump or otherwise limited his options in various attempts to prevent tensions with North Korea, Iran and Syria from escalating, The New Yorker reported Monday, the latest account of Trump’s own officials trying to check his worst instincts. "The president thinks out loud. Do you treat it like an order? Or do you treat it as part of a longer conversation? We treated it as part of a longer conversation," a former senior national security official told The New Yorker. "We prevented a lot of bad things from...

Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced to prison for leaking classified documents and subsequently freed by President Barack Obama, inspired West Point graduate and communist Spenser Rapone to infiltrate the military. Rapone has come under fire and become the subject of an Army investigation after reports emerged of his open and unabashed support for communism and tweets he made calling for political violence and referring to Secretary of Defense James Mattis as an “evil, vile f***.” In a Reddit post regarding Manning, Rapone spelled out some of his motivations for remaining in the military and exactly what he wanted...

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ resignation, which shocked Washington’s national security establishment and rattled America’s allies, was sealed in a fateful 18-hour period that saw President Trump resolve to withdraw troops from Syria – alarming Pentagon officials who see America’s role in the region as crucial. For Mattis, the president’s order was the final straw, Fox News is told. “Make no mistake – Jim Mattis is resigning in protest over the president's national security policies,” a senior U.S. defense official told Fox News.

[The outgoing defense secretary had a good rapport with the 2016 Democratic nominee. Not so much with the president he ultimately worked for.] During the 2016 presidential campaign, James Mattis predicted that he would be courted to serve in a Hillary Clinton administration in the likelihood that she would win the presidency. Instead, Mattis ended up working nearly two years as Secretary of Defense for Donald Trump, a president who routinely undermined his own national security team and would mock Mattis by calling him a “Democrat” or “Moderate Dog.” Mattis' resignation on Thursday, though abrupt, came as no surprise to...